Boston Socked Back to Reality

These are unusual and unsettling times in and around Boston, with the Patriots reigning as the Lombardi Packers of the new millennium and the Red Sox reigning as, good grief, defending World Series champions. So leave it to the NCAA tournament to restore a dose of normality to the newly and strangely delirious New England sports scene.

What in the world is wrong with Boston College?

Thanks, Wisconsin Milwaukee. Boston sports fans, robbed of their natural-born right to gripe about something over the last six months, needed that.

Wisconsin Milwaukee, seeded 12th in the Chicago Regional and supposedly having already overstayed its welcome with a first-round upset over fifth-seeded Alabama, caught Boston College at precisely the right time Saturday -- in the round of 32 -- and bounced the fourth-seeded Eagles out of the tournament, 83-75.

The same Eagles who began their 2004-05 regular season with a 20-0 record.

The same Eagles who began their second-round game against Wisconsin Milwaukee, champion of the lightly regarded Horizon League, with an 11-0 lead.

After that 20-0 start to the season, Boston College went 5-5 in its last 10 games.

After that 11-0 lead against Milwaukee, Boston College was outscored, 83-64.

If that sounds like a trend, consider this: Saturday’s loss was Boston College’s fifth consecutive defeat in the NCAA’s second round. Since 1994, when the Eagles beat North Carolina to advance to the Sweet 16, every subsequent NCAA appearance by Boston College has ended with the same tagline. Two and through.

Also worth noting: Boston College has not won the NCAA men’s basketball championship since the Red Sox sent Babe Ruth to the Yankees. So the curse of the Bambino isn’t dead after all. It just moved on to the next item on the to-torment-today menu.

(How do we know it was the Bambino? Wisconsin Milwaukee Coach Bruce Pearl is a Boston College alum. So, yes, the Eagles were done in by a former Eagle. Those familiar with the Bambino’s body of work know that this is his kind of calling card.)

Meanwhile, Wisconsin Milwaukee continued to fly the flag for the double-digit-seeded underdogs who have commandeered Days 2 and 3 of the 2005 tournament -- applying hammer-dents to the basketball reputations of the Big East and the Big 12 in the process.

Friday, the Big East/Big 12 lost Syracuse and Kansas at the hands of No. 13 Vermont and No. 14 Bucknell, respectively.

Saturday, the Big East/Big 12 casualties were Boston College and Oklahoma, a 67-58 loser to No. 6 Utah.

The upsets continued into the night, leaving no one immune, including the vaunted Atlantic Coast Conference, which saw Wake Forest, seeded second in the Albuquerque Regional, eliminated by seventh-seeded West Virginia in double overtime, 111-105.

There were also upsets that can no longer really be considered upsets. Take Texas Tech’s 71-69 triumph over Gonzaga in the Albuquerque Regional. Technically speaking, this was a No. 6 team taking down a No. 3, but break it down a little further and you find it is simply a blast from the past -- Bob Knight winning a second-round game against a team from the West Coast Conference.

Back in the day, a decade or three ago, Knight used to do this sort of thing on a regular basis. It was easy to forget, given Knight’s recent postseason record -- this will be his first Sweet 16 appearance in 11 years -- and Gonzaga’s recent acceptance as a member of the college basketball elite.

Will those credentials now be revoked, given that that was Gonzaga’s second consecutive second-round defeat? In 2004, the Bulldogs were seeded No. 2 when they were knocked out by Nevada. This year, seeded third, they hit the wall again in the round of 32.

Just a few years ago, Gonzaga was a role model for underdogs everywhere, the little school that could and did and kept struggling up the social ladder until it had the country believing that, yeah, Gonzaga really deserved to be mentioned in the same breath with Arizona, Oklahoma State and Louisville.

It was a great story, tough to resist. But considering the evidence of March ’04 and ‘05, is it possible that the scrappy Bulldogs of Gonzaga might have been, dare it be said, overrated?

Texas Tech has been a reliable quality-control specialist in these matters. Remember the furor last football season about California getting snubbed by the big bowls? Texas Tech laid that controversy to rest with a 45-31 rout of Cal in the Holiday Bowl.

Exit Cal, stage right. Bring on Gonzaga on a basketball court a few months later. Same result both times -- West Coast wannabe gets Texas Tech reality check.

Saturday was also a testing ground for two other West Coast tales of note: Washington trying to justify its No. 1 seeding in the Albuquerque Regional, the University of the Pacific trying to extend the Big West dream into the tournament’s second week. As the Huskies and Tigers were paired in the second round, something had to give. Not surprisingly, the Pac-10 dispatched the Big West, Washington advancing by a 97-79 margin.

Thus ended Pacific’s landmark season, which included the school’s first top-25 ranking and a 22-game winning streak that ended in the Big West tournament final. The multinational Tigers, led by the European trio of Guillaume Yango, Jasko Korajkic and Christian Maraker, had been a lot of fun, their run to the second round sounding like the setup for a late-night pub joke: Two Swedes and a Frenchman walk into a tournament ...

Yango, a senior winding down his France-to-Stockton cultural experiment, played gamely for Pacific, scoring 17 points and collecting 10 rebounds. But Washington simply had too much to prove and too much on the floor for the Tigers. And so, alas, this NCAA game would be the last for this Yango from Paris.