Marquette would have had a number of legitimate excuses if it had lost Saturday night's regular season finale against Pittsburgh at the Bradley Center.
Its second-leading scorer, sophomore Jerel McNeal (14.7 ppg), injured his right thumb in Friday's practice and is out indefinitely. Its leading scorer, sophomore Dominic James (14.9 ppg), missed a good portion of the second half due to leg cramping. Furthermore, Marquette's opponent entered the game a win away from a share of the Big East regular season title.
But instead of offering excuses, Marquette head coach Tom Crean could barely contain his elation during the post-game press conference.
"Without sounding corny, this is one of those days they will never forget," Crean said.
That's because the No. 21 Golden Eagles (23-8, 10-6 Big East), behind sophomore Wesley Matthews' 20 points, held on to beat a sub-par Panthers squad 75-71 and, in the process, gave reasons why they just had to win this game.
Perhaps it was the national exposure of ESPN College Gameday – the network aired its flagship college basketball preview show Saturday morning from the Bradley Center – and a primetime appearance on ESPN.
"When you have this kind of opportunity," Crean said, "you have to seize it."
Maybe the presence of Marquette's 1977 National Championship team, which was honored at halftime, helped lift the current team's spirits. The 19,021 in attendance possibly had an impact, too, as the raucous crowd piled on Pittsburgh's anguish and forced head coach Jamie Dixon to call three timeouts in the one-sided first half.
Regardless, the result served as a confidence boost given that the Golden Eagles entered Saturday having lost four of five games and possibly without one of their best players for the remainder of the season.
Picking up the slack in McNeal's absence were Matthews and reserve freshman guard David Cubillan, who also finished with 20 points after hitting four three-pointers and going 8-for-8 from the free-throw line in the final minute.
"I hope this gives him a lot of confidence," Matthews said of Cubillan. "He wasn't taking any bad shots… he was taking shots we want him to take, and he started knocking them down. He really helped us pull away from them a little bit."
Marquette led by as many as 17 in the second half before James, who had 10 assists, began cramping up.
"We had a lot of problems with (James' leg cramps) last year," Crean said. "We've had very few this year. Tonight was one of those nights."
No. 12 Pittsburgh (25-6, 12-4) slowly chipped away at the lead, but its perimeter shooters struggled too much to fully take advantage of a weakened Marquette team. Levance Fields, Antonio Graves and Ronald Ramon went a combined 6-of-30 from the field and 4-of-17 from beyond the arc.
Despite being out of sorts for most of the game, Pittsburgh found itself down 61-57 with 2:14 left after two Sam Young free throws. Marquette responded when Cubillan buried a three in the corner off a Matthews pass, and the Golden Eagles made 11 of 12 free throws to hold off the Panthers' rally.