Jamarii Thomas finally let it all out. After finishing his post-game press conference, South Carolina’s point guard closed the door, walked down the hallway and let out a yell.
“HALLELUJAH!”
He surely was not the only one in Columbia with the sentiment.
South Carolina men’s basketball is finally on the board in SEC play after an 84-69 win over Texas, a wire-to-wire domination so convincing, it turned around 13 games of frustration. Six losses in games within a score in the final minute, with every conceivable way a team could lose a heartbreaking game thrown in.
What emotion could possibly sum up the feeling? Joy? Pride? Excitement?
None of the above.
“The feeling is just a sigh of relief,” Collin Murray-Boyles said. “That we can finally taste what it’s like to win in the SEC, and hopefully keep it going for the rest of conference play.”
Relief.
South Carolina (11-16, 1-13 SEC) has done, by any rational measure, an astounding job of remaining focused and engaged through these defeats. The losses have mounted, any realistic chance at the postseason faded from view a long time ago, and yet the Gamecocks have continuously battled down to the wire against the nation’s elite. This team, injuries and winless conference record and all, took the likes of Auburn, Florida, Texas A&M and Ole Miss to the brink all in the face of seemingly certain results.
Effort is a prerequisite, but it doesn’t matter who you are. When you have a season like this, it is easy to throw in the towel. Human nature, even.
It hasn’t happened, and Lamont Paris finally saw his team rewarded.
“For them to continually have the energy, the effort, the belief that they have in anticipation of playing well and winning a game has been really impressive,” Paris said. “And that’s what I was proud of them for.”
What does it mean going forward? Nobody is trying to sell it as season-saving, or absolving the previous four months. South Carolina will play four more regular season games, go to the SEC Tournament and barring a miraculous run with five wins in five days, enter the off-season off a disappointing year.
But in the short term? It’s everything. This was validation of the process, confirmation of the feeling of being close and the ecstasy of finally achieving a goal all rolled into one night.
“It’s easy to be consumed by that,” Paris said about being winless in SEC play. “You’re not even really looking at the performance necessarily. That’s all they [players] hear about.”
As demoralizing as it has been, a 3-15, 2-16 or even a 1-17 season in the SEC is not unique. It’s brutal, and will require off-season roster surgery to dig out of, but it is not historic. Only two teams in conference history have run the entire gauntlet winless, and both are infamous.
South Carolina will not join that group, and will be able to flush this season as a bad, but not historically bad, one when it ends.
“Now they can take everything at face value,” Paris said. “The whole world opened up again. They can listen to things differently that I say. They can process things differently now that they’re not consumed by one thing. I think that’s where relief comes in, that you’re able to move forward and the last thing you remember is playing pretty well.”
The celebrations continued. The zeroes turned into ones. The dreaded, odious “L13” in the streak column simply reads a modest “W1” with no trace of the past. There will be time for a season breakdown and a deep dive on everything else later.
Tonight, for once, the only thing that mattered was a positive one.
What a relief.
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