I Still Miss the Old Big East

I'll play the old man in the room here. I still miss the Big East the way it used to be. When Syracuse, Georgetown, Villanova and UConn were national powers (yes, I realize two of those programs still are). I miss the sights and sounds of Madison Square Garden during Big East tournament week and I was smacked in the face with that reminder Wednesday night while at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn taking in Notre Dame-Virginia Tech and Syracuse-North Carolina.

The crowd was sparse and in all honesty, the Tar Heel powder blue outnumbered the Orange, well....orange. And aside from any of that, the building (which is beautiful by the way) never rose to a level of hysteria the way the Garden used to do when Gerry McNamara and Kemba Walker and Allen Iverson and Ray Allen and Scottie Reynolds were were willing their teams to dramatic wins. The fact that the ACC Tournament is rotating from Brooklyn to Charlotte and back to Greensboro highlights the nomad nature of this superconference. True rivalries have yet to be formed and even the old ones i.e. Duke-North Carolina don't carry as much fervor with an influx of 'one and done' players to those programs.

I know all of that is in the past and we shouldn't cry because it's over, but instead smile because it happened and all that blah blah blah, but I still miss the old Big East. Don't you?