Stony Brook back on championship stage, but not your typical Cinderella

Tyler Stephenson-Moore exults as Stony Brook finishes upset of Hofstra in CAA tournament semifinals. Seawolves will face Charleston Tuesday for conference title. (Photo by Stony Brook Men’s Basketball)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — March 12, 2016.

That was the last time Stony Brook experienced a game of this magnitude, with the stakes amplified to the level they are on Tuesday. On that day, Jameel Warney strapped the Seawolves onto his back with one of the most dominant individual performances in recent history, erupting for 43 points and 10 rebounds to bring an America East Conference championship to Long Island and give then-head coach Steve Pikiell his long-awaited March breakthrough.

Eight years to the day later, Suffolk County is back in the lobby outside the dance floor, as Stony Brook — the No. 7 seed in the Coastal Athletic Association tournament — will play its fourth game in as many days when it tips off against top seed and regular season champion Charleston for the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.

“We’re not the seventh-best team in the league,” head coach Geno Ford imparted after watching his team author back-to-back upsets of Drexel and Hofstra. “We don’t believe that, our guys don’t believe that. They’ve got a lot of grit to them.”

“This is what you live for, to live in moments like this,” added senior guard Tyler Stephenson-Moore. “This is my last ride and a lot of guys’ last rides, so we gotta come to play. They’re gonna push the tempo, we’ve just gotta stop them in transition and just play confident.”

Stony Brook will attempt to become just the second No. 7 seed to win the CAA tournament, following East Carolina in 1993, but the first to defeat each of the top three seeds on the way to the title. With 20 wins this season, the Seawolves are not the typical plucky March darlings normally found this time of year, having been in contention in most of their games this season, including their lone meeting with Charleston. Pat Kelsey’s Cougars erased a 15-point deficit that night, and the depth his program possesses behind the likes of Ante Brzovic, Ben Burnham and Reyne Smith is something his counterpart admitted would be challenging to overcome.

“They’re a great team,” Ford said of Charleston. “They’ve got a ton of depth, they’re going to keep coming at you in waves. The game at our place, we had a 15-point lead and I think their depth just wore us down as the game went. (Tuesday), we’ll have adrenaline going, guys are going to want to play. It ain’t gonna matter who’s hurt or who’s tired, but it’ll be difficult because of how great they are. They’re the best team for a reason, and they’ve been the best team for two years.”

“They’re a hard team to beat when it’s in the nineties, but our guards are aggressive. Tyler’s not going to turn down good looks in transition, Dean Noll’s aggressive, Aaron Clarke’s aggressive, so that kind of forces our pace to be higher.”

Ford admitted some of the losses his group has suffered this season — each setback to a team ahead of Stony Brook in the conference standings was by single digits — had been deflating. Still, he credited the resilient backbone of his roster and the competitive nature of the aforementioned close contests as driving forces behind the Seawolves getting to the precipice of March Madness, and is confident enough in his young charges to where there is substance behind the boasts and not just smoke and mirrors.

“We’ve got a belief that we’re good enough to beat everybody,” he said. “And if you go through, we actually — in the regular season — played the top teams better than anybody in the league even though we only pulled off a win against Wilmington. We had Charleston down by 15, they came storming all the way back and beat us six. We lost at Towson in overtime, we lost at Delaware. We’ve done this ourselves. Those kinds of games are stomach-punch losses, and our kids have just been resilient, man. They’ve just hung in there and kept battling, so they believe that we’re good enough to do it.”

“We’ll have our hands full, we know that. But we’ve felt like, for the last three-plus weeks, that we’re playing as well as anybody in the league. We keep talking about that we really feel like we’re the hottest team in the league. They may have been the best team for two months. We’ve only gotta be the best team for 40 minutes.”