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You spend your life in the gym, you spend as many hours playing and teaching and coaching basketball as Bob Leckie has, then you know when a game is won, the same way an elite chef knows his meal is done without relying on a timer.
Friday night at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, that moment arrived for Leckie at some point in the final minute — when it was clear the Saint Peter’s Peacocks weren’t going to miss any free throws, when it was obvious they weren’t going to commit any egregious fouls, as the seconds melted away and there the Peacocks were, safely on the left side of the hyphen.
“Intuitively,” Leckie said, laughing, “after so many years and so many games, you just know.”
That part was easy. That part was familiar.
This part wasn’t: As he watched his alma mater put the finishing touches on a 67-64 win over Purdue in the East Region semifinals, securing a berth in the Elite Eight, Leckie felt something he’d never felt before — not as a player at Brooklyn’s St. Francis Prep or at Saint Peter’s, not as a coach at Bishop Loughlin or Saint Peter’s, not after thousands and thousands of games.
He started to cry. At a basketball game.
“And wouldn’t you know it, talking to you right now, I’m starting to well up all over again,” Leckie said, laughing.
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Leckie was sitting on a charter bus Saturday morning that was taking him and his old Saint Peter’s teammates back home for the day — where they could regroup, recharge their batteries and get a good night’s sleep before doing it all over again Sunday. Then, the Peacocks will take on North Carolina for the right to play in the Final Four.
Think about that last sentence. Read it again.
Saint Peter’s. North Carolina. For the FINAL FOUR.
“Unfathomable,” Bob Leckie said. Then he laughed.
“Unfreakingbelievable,” he added.
It has started to sink in for everyone — for the old-school die-hards like Leckie, and for everyone else who has simply adopted the Peacocks: They aren’t just a win away from the Final Four, they are now exactly halfway to a national championship. Three down, three to go. That may seem unthinkable, or unimaginable, or unfathomable, or unfreakingbelievable.
But what if I’d told you two weeks ago Saint Peter’s would still be standing and Kentucky, Gonzaga, Arizona and Baylor — among many, many others — weren’t.
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“I didn’t go to school here,” said Larry Portocelli, who was standing in front of McDermott Hall on the school’s postage-stamp-sized campus, near the corner of Glenwood Avenue and Kennedy Boulevard. He was waiting on a friend and together they’d hoped to see if the school’s bookstore was open Saturday (it wasn’t, alas). “My friends all around the country want Saint Peter’s gear. Who doesn’t love a story like this?”
A few blocks away, a five-minute walk down Montgomery Street, where it runs into Summit Avenue, the old Jersey City Armory stood proud sentry on a rainy Saturday morning, its red-brick façade glistening as if boasting of all the memories bursting inside.
Back in the day, this was the place to be in Jersey City, back in the late ’60s when Leckie and his teammates on the Run Baby Run Peacocks were leading the nation in scoring, dropping 109 on Manhattan and 112 on Vermont and 123 on Stonehill. There was one unforgettable Saturday night in February ’68 when somehow they squeezed 7,000 people in there with Niagara in town. It was Calvin Murphy’s show that night. He scored 50. It was the last game Saint Peter’s lost that year before the NIT semifinals, against Jo Jo White and Kansas.
“We were the darlings of Jersey City,” Leckie said. “Everywhere you went, people knew who you were.”
They will know this gaggle of Peacocks, too, and their names will resound in Jersey City as long as the old-timers have: Lee and Banks, Ndefo and Edert, the Drame twins. For those who live and breathe Saint Peter’s, as they watch through moist eyes and scream with hoarse and scratchy voices, this will be an eternal time stamp.
“They’ll never be forgotten,” Bob Leckie said. “What they’ve done, for themselves and for a school that really needed it? That’ll be forever.”
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