You dream and you dream big when Rick Pitino shows up to coach your team, when he plants that magical seed that grows into a forever moment you want to freeze-frame in your March Madness consciousness.
He hasn’t just taken the torch from the late, great Looie Carnesecca, he has fanned the flame of greatness and raised it to the roof at the top of the Big East Conference Tournament championship at the Garden.
It took St. John’s, the 82-66 winner over Creighton, 25 years to be The Beast of the Big East again, to cut down the Garden nets again, and look at Pitino’s Johnnies now, starring on Broadway again, New York’s Team again, the apple of the Big Apple’s eye.
He has had so many dream jobs across his 72 years, won one national championship at Kentucky and one at Louisville, but this one, in his Garden of dreams from the time he was a boy, snowed under by a blizzard of red, white and blue confetti, loved in this moment the way only a standing room-only New York crowd could love one of its own, this was basketball heaven for the Native Son originally from 26th Street in Manhattan and Queens and raised in Bayville, L.I., and a point guard at St. Dominic High in Oyster Bay.
