Feb. 11, 2010

By Mike Prisuta

They went to overtime - again - which, in retrospect, wasn't surprising given the school-record five times Duquesne had gone beyond the regulation 40 minutes previously this season and given the Dukes and UMass being "a mirror image of each other," according to Minutemen head coach Derek Kellogg.

"Just the style of play, the way we were both shooting the ball from the perimeter, how we need to score and get buckets, it's really, as the game indicated, two pretty evenly-matched teams on paper and at times on the floor," Kellogg said.

The Dukes and the Minutemen are both 3-7 in the Atlantic 10 in the wake of UMass' 84-80 OT triumph on Thursday night at the Palumbo Center.

An emerging difference between the teams, the defining difference, perhaps, in a game Duquesne twice led by 16 in the second half and by four in overtime might have been an intangible one.

"They're starting to believe," Kellogg said of his team. "This reinforces a lot of things I've been teaching and coaching. A lot of times with young kids you have to get them to believe that the process has an end result. And when you win games they see it and then they feel it and then at some point they take it over and I don't have to coach every play as much.

"(Thursday night), especially in the second half I was able to let those guys play and feel the game and figure it out."

The Dukes are in more of a "disbelief" mode right about now.

Although they were out-rebounded, 60-33, other statistics, as well as the scoreboard for significant stretches, suggested this was a game that could have and should have been Duquesne's.

"We think we should have won that game," Duquesne guard B.J. Monteiro said.

Duquesne's 13 steals and the 22 turnovers committed by UMass supported the theory.

Somehow, it didn't happen.

"I'm just as disappointed as I could be," Dukes head coach Ron Everhart said after his team fell to 12-12 overall.

Why wouldn't he be?

On a night when do-it-all Damian Saunders became the 33rd player in Duquesne history to amass 1,000 career points what will be remembered most is Saunders succumbing to cramps, twice leaving the game briefly in the second half and never regaining the dominance that's often taken for granted.

Saunders was 4-for-6 from the floor in the first half.

He finished 6-for-17 and also missed his only two free throws in the second half.

Those were shot with 44.5 seconds remaining in regulation and the game tied at 72-72.

"He seemed like he could go," Everhart said. "He said he could go. I didn't think he had the bounce and the step that he had in the first half later in the second half. But when he came out with the cramps we really kind of went into the tank a little bit so I elected to go with him down the stretch."

Missed layups out of timeouts, missed dunks on put-backs, an inability to rebound a missed three with 10.1 seconds left in regulation and a failure to corral a missed free throw down two with 17.9 seconds left in overtime also conspired to ruin Duquesne's evening.

UMass unleashing a barrage of 10 made threes after halftime had something to do with it, too, as revealing an example of Kellogg's belief-taking-over theory as any.

"We gotta get a rebound on a free throw," Everhart said. "We gotta get that rebound at the end of the game there where we just drop it out of bounds. Those are effort plays. That's just one man's will over another man's skill and we didn't make the play.

"I don't want to sit here and sound like we didn't play hard because I thought our effort was very good. I just thought for whatever reason in the second half we didn't guard nearly as well. A large part of that was those guards (Ricky Harris and Anthony Curley) made some deep threes that they missed early in the game."

Belief and disbelief.

So far it's been that kind of season.