"5:24," Don DiJulia said to me when I walked up to the concourse a few minutes thereafter to find some St. Joe's fans waiting to have their tickets torn.
At the front of the line, standing right next to my Philly.com colleague Patrick Carney (whose alter ego is a student there), was Broomall native Andrew Cellucci (at right). Since Patrick is obviously ineligible, Andrew gets the prize for being the first Hawks fan in the house.
"It's a Big 5 tradition," he said. "Penn doesn't show up until what, 10 minutes before the game? We want to make sure that this is our house."
I've heard it said before by St. Joe's people that for various reasons, the one game they really don't like losing other than Villanova is the Penn game. It doesn't make any sense to me, to be honest. Shouldn't the conference games against Temple and La Salle matter more?
I asked Andrew, and got quite an answer.
"Penn thinks -- I don't want to sound arrogant -- but they think we're like a safety school," he said. "So it's kind of something for us to prove, playing in the Palestra even though it's their home court."
He continued.
"We just want to make our school seem like it can be as good as an Ivy League institution," he said. "We feel like we're one of the top schools in the Northeast, even though we're not an Ivy League school, so it just feels like we have something to prove."
Wow. I honestly had no idea there was that kind of inferiority complex. And I certainly had no idea the safety school chants actually meant anything.
But he acknowledged that really, St. Joe's is pretty much always the better team, which gives this game some stakes that the other Big 5 games don't necessarily have.
"It's tough for us to compete with Villanova -- they're a Big East school, they've won a national championship in the last 20 years," he said. "So it's a game we feel like we should win every year."
Interesting stuff, to be sure. I'll be back in just over an hour to set the scene and tip things off on the rest of tonight's liveblogging.
Comments (1)
"We feel like we're one of the top schools in the Northeast, even though we're not an Ivy League school, so it just feels like we have something to prove."
WOW
Posted by Riiight | January 20, 2008 5:13 PM
Posted on January 20, 2008 17:13