Saint Joseph's and Temple played a thrilling game at the Palestra yesterday. It had everything that's great about the Big 5 -- a near-sellout crowd, a tense finish and clutch shots all over the floor.
People should be talking for a long time about Rob Ferguson's game-winning tip-in with 2.2 seconds remaining to make the score 59-57 for St. Joe's. But I'm worried that they won't be.
I'm worried that they'll be talking about Owls coach John Chaney instead. What else should we expect, though, when a pack of reporters starts to resemble a pile of kindling staring at a matchbook?
Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the questions at Chaney's postgame press conference dealt with the last time these two teams played.
Yes, that game. The one where Owls forward Nehemiah Ingram broke the arm of Hawks forward John Bryant, resulting in a kind of sound and fury almost never before seen in the Big 5's 50-year history.
Chaney was asked yesterday if he was "hopeful it's all over now."
If there was ever a real-life scene that deserved dramatic music playing in the background, that was it -- and life did indeed imitate art.
Chaney criticized the media for making too big a deal out of his actions, and emphasized how he has since smoothed over his relationship with Hawks coach Phil Martelli. Indeed, they teamed up in a big disaster-relief effort to aid victims of last fall's hurricanes and earthquake.
"But if you want to sing that song, keep on singing it," Chaney said of last year.
"I'm not optimistic about nothing -- Philadelphia doesn't let nothing go," he said. "I'm a lightning rod, and I know it, and I love it."
He also knows that being in such a position has as many positives as it does negatives. It allows him to be a major influence in the lives of his players, but it also leads to controversies that can easily explode onto the national stage.
"Everybody overreacts when an incident like that takes place, and it's on television a thousand times," he said. "And it grows more and more each time."
It was clear how much Chaney wanted to talk about the present instead of the past. He wanted to talk about center Wayne Marshall's improvement this season and the kinds of defenses his team threw at the Hawks' sharpshooting offense.
And after ten long minutes, Chaney got to break the tension in the room for just a moment when he was asked about how it feels to have lost seven straight to the Hawks.
He compared that streak to having lost to No. 1 Duke in each of the last two seasons, and took a guess as to what will happen when the Owls and Blue Devils meet in February.
"Duke has beaten us all the time," he said. "And they're going to beat us again."
The room filled with much-needed laughter.
But as so often happens in this city, the past dominated the conversation at the expense of the present. This time, though, it wasn't Chaney's fault.
