BURLINGTON, Vt. &- With his team ahead, 77-66, and 1:34 left in Saturday’s America East Championship game, University of Vermont senior forward Marqus Blakely received a pass from teammate Garvey Young at the free-throw line, took two steps toward the hoop, rose above the rim and unleashed a thunderous dunk over senior guard Carlos Strong of the Boston University men’s basketball team.
All Strong could do was smile, conceding the inevitable: second-seeded Vermont (25-9) had punched its ticket to the NCAA Tournament and denied fourth-seeded BU (19-13) its first conference title since 2002.
“I’m very, very proud of our team,” said UVM coach Mike Lonergan. “Boston University, I’d like to give a lot of credit. It’s not easy when you’re picked to win the league. They had a new coach. I thought he did a great job and they got hot at the right time. At Hartford, it was a little scary how good they were playing.
“But I knew we’d have a chance at home. We have a great team with a special player.”
And that special player was the 6-foot-5, 225-pound Blakely.
Blakely, the two-time AE Player of the Year, posted game highs of 24 points and 18 rebounds to lead the Catamounts past the Terriers, 83-70, before a raucous crowd of 3,266 at Patrick Gymnasium.
“Coming in here, we knew Marqus was going to be terrific today,” said BU coach Patrick Chambers. “We just tried to throw different things at him. He played a great game. He played like a Player of the Year should play.”
But he also had some help. Senior guard Nick Vier &- who went 4-for-4 from 3-point range &- had 15 points, and junior forward Evan Fjeld, whose mother passed away from cancer earlier in the week, played with a heavy heart, contributing nine points and six boards.
Senior guard Corey Lowe scored a team-high 24 points to pace BU, while sophomore forward Jake O’Brien (17 points) and Strong (11 points) were the other Terriers in double figures.
Junior forward John Holland’s offensive struggles in big games continued, as he tallied nine points on 3-of-11 shooting. For the AE Tournament, the conference’s scoring king averaged 10.3 points per game &- nine points below his season average &- and shot 33.3 percent from the floor in three contests.
“John’s a talented kid,” O’Brien said. “We know what he can do. We need
John, but we have a lot of other guys who are willing to step up. It’s a collective effort, not just one individual.”
A Blakely runner as time expired capped off a first half that saw the Catamounts shoot a staggering 64 percent from the field, compared to the Terriers’ 34.8 percent, and Vermont headed into the locker room with a 42-31 advantage.
Out of the break, BU went on a 22-12 run, which culminated in Lowe draining a long 3 from the left wing to cut Vermont’s lead to one, 54-53, with 10:20 to go. It appeared the momentum had shifted toward BU’s side.
“We came out of the half with a little more fire and intensity,” O’Brien said. “We needed to defend and rebound a little better. I think we did that, and it turned around on offense. We’ve faced a lot of adversity this year, so we’ve been able to battle through a lot.
“We were just trying to chip away at the lead, and I think we did gain a little bit of momentum during that stretch.”
But Blakely and company weren’t concerned.
“We knew that we were going to take their first hit coming out of the second half,” Blakely said. “We knew that they weren’t shooting the 3-ball that well, and they did come out shooting well. We took their first hit. The home crowd gave us the energy to come back.”
The one-point deficit was as close as BU would get in the second session. Vermont’s 3-pointers and free throws down the stretch sealed the outcome, and Blakely added the exclamation point when he posterized Strong in the game’s final minutes.
For BU, the pursuit of its seventh NCAA Tournament appearance in program history came to a disappointing end.
“Right not, we all feel pretty bad,” Lowe said. “Overall, this was a great year for us. We had never made it this far. We’re going to take a lot of positives out of it, but right now, it hurts a little bit.”
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