Pitarresi: Kudos to the Evans family

Everyone seems stunned by LeMoyne’s 82-79 exhibition basketball victory over Syracuse Tuesday.

 

Some SU fans see it as the end of the world, others just toss it off.

 

My thoughts? Congratulations to Rome’s Steve Evans, the Dolphins’ coach – and his dad, Stan “Buddy” Evans – for their victory. I think it is great. LeMoyne gets some good ink, air time, and a lot of confidence, and SU isn’t really hurt much, unless ….

 

Unless the Orange get off to a slow start in the regular season, in which case everybody is going to remember this game and Jim Boeheim and his players will never hear the end of it.

 

At the other end, Steve Evans downplayed the win, saying it was just an exhibition and that SU would be just fine. Probably so, and a smart and classy move by Steve, but he has to be walking on air. No New York State team had beaten SU in a game, exhibition game or - I'm assuming - scrimmage since about 1957.

 

One thing the game did was set off an eruption of comments on syracuse.com. I check in there every now and then when I want to get thoroughly depressed about the state of civility and the level of intelligence in our society, or if I want a good laugh. Today, I got a good laugh, thanks to the people discussing why LeMoyne is known as the Dolphins (a Christian symbol) and SU is known as the Orange (supposedly based on Protestant King William of Orange, although now I’m having trouble verifying that.)

 

Someone wrote that that there are no dolphins around Syracuse, so another guy writes that there are no oranges, either. Then another writes that SU has that name because the nickname used to be “Orangemen,” which, he claims, is another name for American Indians. What!?!? And I don't think the guy was horsing around.