Without looking ahead, Saint Peter’s faces prospect of what Elite 8 would mean

Doug Edert (25) drives past Monmouth in MAAC championship, and hopes to steer Saint Peter’s to a regional final. (Photo by Bob Dea/Daly Dose Of Hoops)

PHILADELPHIA — Part of the charm of Saint Peter’s magical run through the NCAA Tournament is how the Peacocks have never looked ahead of or past them in their storybook March.

But as just the third No. 15 seed to play in a regional semifinal, and with the hopes of a downtrodden and stagnant New York-New Jersey college basketball landscape resting squarely on its shoulders, Cinderella could not avoid the question:

What would it mean to live to fight another day, to take the court again on Sunday against another blueblood, with a trip to the Final Four hanging in the balance?

“It means everything,” Shaheen Holloway said as Saint Peter’s — the first local team in the Sweet 16 since he helped lead Seton Hall there in 2000 — seeks to become the area’s first Elite 8 participant since St. John’s in 1999. “Everybody keeps talking about my team that played 22 years ago, but you try not to think about that. You try not to put that kind of pressure on this team, but if that happens, that’d be tremendous, not just for Jersey, but for the tri-state area to have a team represented in the Elite 8. It’s hard to get to this point, so when you’re here, you’ve just got to continue to keep working and try to get further and further.”

The roll-up-your-sleeves, grinder mentality has been a trademark of Jersey City’s Division I program, even before Holloway arrived in 2018 and his predecessor, John Dunne, was extracting blood from a stone on an almost annual basis at Saint Peter’s, but the yeoman’s effort toward turning the Peacocks into a team that could scrap and fight with anyone on any given night has turned heads far beyond the Hudson River, garnering attention across the nation.

“I’m impressed with Saint Peter’s,” Purdue head coach Matt Painter, who now becomes the next man charged with making sure the clock strikes midnight, said Thursday. “I’m impressed with how hard they play, how competitive they are. We’re going to have our hands full. He might be 6’7”, but (KC) Ndefo’s going to block your shot. They have a lot of people that can be in two places at one time. (Holloway) does a good job, man. He’s a really good coach.”

“What he’s done is unbelievable,” UCLA’s Mick Cronin opined. “I love him. Where he comes from, what he’s accomplished in his career, in his life, at Saint Peter’s is the greatest story. If you’ve been there and you know him, to me, it’s a miracle.”

The Peacocks’ renaissance under Holloway has certainly emerged as a human-interest story as well as the latest tangible memento of how special this tournament and this month can be, but the platitudes and hyperbole ends there as far as Saint Peter’s is concerned. This Cinderella acts like it has been there before, and instead of a gown and glass slippers, it wears the look of a hungry veteran intent on making its adversary work for anything it is fortunate to receive in the heat of battle.

“We don’t feel any pressure,” point guard Matthew Lee — whose father, Butch, won a national championship in 1977 leading a Marquette team with a similar mindset — said. “We’re just here to play basketball. It’s something we’ve been doing our whole career. Even though it’s a bigger stage, at the end of the day, it’s just basketball.”

“We’re all looking to prove ourselves, as a program, as a basketball team,” Doug Edert added. “It starts in practice. Everyone’s looking to compete against each other so we can be able to execute the game plan for whatever game we’re about to play, and up until recently, the chip on our shoulder is getting bigger and bigger. We’re still trying to prove ourselves. We’re not satisfied with anything right now, and we’re going to continue to keep that going.”