5) The home loss to Albany during the 2005-06 season. Jan. 28, 2006.
BU led by 13 with six minutes to go. The rest is history, and I’m sure I’ll never forget the name Jason Siggers.
4) The parade of three-point losses Binghamton endured this year. Umm, several.
Painful and excruciating can’t even describe how it felt to see so many games slip away this season. There was a lot of parity in the AE, but somehow other teams came away with more wins. If not for a few late Mike Gordon shots, we may have had only two wins in conference play.
3) The overtime loss to Maine in the 2004 tourney. March 6, 2004.
Binghamton took a very good Black Bears team to the brink. But if you have to lose a game like that, you want to lose it by missing a shot at the buzzer, not by losing the ball before the shot even goes up. That’s what makes it sting.
2) Watching Albany play UConn. March 17, 2006.
Remember when everyone in Vestal was so sure the Bearcats were the team that would earn the right to get blasted in the first round of the NCAAs? Not only did the Great Danes make Connecticut earn that round-of-65 win, but tell me you weren’t thinking that Jim Nantz should have been talking about Andre Heard the whole time. Well, that would have been the case if not for ‘
1) The second half of the 2006 AE tournament loss to Vermont. March 5, 2006.
There was no more painful time to love the green and black. The tension in the Events Center was off the charts the entire half, as shots stopped falling and the team unraveled. With Sebastian Hermenier on the bench with a foot injury, our lead slipped away and we just couldn’t muster what it took to close that five-point gap in the final 20 minutes. The air was sucked out of the building when our season came to a screeching halt, knowing we had been oh so close to the NCAA tournament.
Honorable mentions:
‘ The press conference announcing Al Walker’s reassignment this March. It was an unsettling combination of dissatisfaction and failure after a gut-wrenching season, combined with a sense of trying to look toward the future during a day when it was hard not to reflect.
‘ The 27-point home loss to Vermont in January, 2005, when nothing went right. Most people would put this one in the bottom five because of the drubbing we took and the ‘Wake up call’ headline that graced the back page of this publication. But in reality, it was just another loss in a so-so season.