The fact that it all unfolded during a pre-season game, the fact that Laurence Ekperigin cooked Syracuse to the recipe of a 20-point, 11-board showing in a game witnessed by a local and not national audience, seems to have kept LeMoyne's pulse-pumping upset over Syracuse in the dark.
A small Division-II college, LeMoyne is located in Syracuse. For lifetimes, the Dolphins have been the slept-on, Houdini-like invisible, second-class citizen to the famed Orange.
They took all those years of playing invisible second fiddle, of being an unheralded, unnoticed, under-appreciated neighbor in a basketball-crazed city and flipped it upside down.
The agony turned to ecstasy.
For one glaring moment, David had thrashed Goliath with a stone. The shoe was suddenly on the other foot.
It was the mythical evening of Nov.3, 2009 at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, when the unheralded little brother buried the non-believers under a barrage of three-pointers.
When Christopher Johnson scorched the nets, lighting up 'Cuse for a 22-spot on 8-of-16 sniping (depositing six treys).
When Ekperigin, the D-II All-American (and all-time leading scorer at LeMoyne, where Mamaroneck's Jason Holmes played, for all you Section I gurus reading) who starred at Walter Panas High School, jumped so high that he patted the brush on Marvin the Martian's head before coming down to planet earth and landing a banger.
The Dolphins defeated the storied program before an orange-clad circus of onlookers, a storybook finish before a local following on SNY.
Only the loss did not count for Syracuse, as it was considered a pre-season game for the Orange. LeMoyne College established history in its own right, going from unheard of clown to talk of the town in the ear-shattering, multi-second sound of a game-ending buzzer.
The Orange, however, would go on to author a successful 2009-10 campaign, evolving into the nation's top-ranked team at one point. The country suddenly became swept by the electrifying, versatile, and long-leaping talent of Wesley Johnson.
And so the LeMoyne pre-season blunder was an afterthought.
Any lingering talk of the mammoth 82-79 upset loss to LeMoyne in the pre-season (a game in which Syracuse starters played 32+ minutes) was quickly softened, subdued, and quelled.
Because the game is not official, it will never be equated with the same type of hype as Kansas losing to Northern Iowa or even a Harvard beating Boston College during the mid-season (don't sleep on Jeremy Lin), because an upset loss of that magnitude is much more of a determinant of fate.
Pre-season games in basketball, especially college basketball, where Division-I teams frequently get the kinks out against inferior teams to get some pre-season game, are rendered meaningless.
Mop-up guys get a chance to eat up some minutes and the seventh man appears as if he's going to be the go-to-guy. Only this was not the typical pre-season game.
Ekperigin came in as the unknown, but he registered his presence with bucket after bucket. One Syracuse player, Peekskill product Mookie Jones, had witnessed the act before. Jones and Ekperigin used to get after it in high school.
Little brother LeMoyne had done the unthinkable by overwhelming Hall of Fame coach Jim Boeheim and the Orange.
LeMoyne topped their neighborly bully 'Cuse, the NBA pipeline which captured a national championship when buoyed a buckets-bagging freshman named Carmelo Anthony.
While that epic, dragon slaying performance may have slipped away from public conscience, Ekperigin's performance did not. The game was kept in the darkness, but what's done in the dark shall soon come to light.
The Cortlandt Manor native, who shot 15-for-17 durin a 40-point explosion against St. Micheal's two years ago, found himself competing for in the NBA summer league. He played for the Denver Nuggets summer league squad, a patchwork group of nearly all unsigned rookies and players trying to make a roster spot. One of the few signed players was Nuggets guard Ty Lawson, who averaged 16.4 points in five games.
"Laurence opened up a lot of eyes with his performance that game," said Section I junkie John "Grassroots" Kelly.
"You know, NBA scouts attend Syracuse games as if they have a season ticket package. The fact that he stole the show from guys like Wes Johnson and Andy Rautins proved that he's an NBA-caliber talent. His game has really come along since his days at Panas and you know, there are guys like Charles Oakley and Ben Wallace, both of whom played at Division-II Virginia Union. Any time you see a guy who's maybe been unsung play in the NBA summer league, you hope he proves himself."
Eperigin struggled mightily the first few games, scoring just three points and committing an average of three turnovers in around 10 minutes of burn. The 6-foot-7 forward would flip the script, however, dropping 14 points (4-for-4 FG, 6-for-9 FT) in a 99-71 drubbing of the Chicago Bulls. The switch he flipped continued to illuminate in the Nuggets' ensuing game, as Ekperigin submitted a summer-high 21 points while tearing down six boards against Houston.
Ekperigin was selected with the 65th pick of the South Korean Basketball Ddraft. He will prolong his career in the East Asian republic south of the Korean Peninsula.
Several former NCAA stars were also selected in the SKA draft, including former UConn bruising forward Jeff Adrien.
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So K-Rod's pummeling of his baby mama's pops has made him the most volatile New Yorker on this side of alleged subway attacker Jose Rojas. Only Rojas was under the influence, K-ROD was completely and 100 percent spober. Looks like Team Titanic continues to flounder closer and closer into the abyss, with their hopes burning quicker than a Vince Coleman firecracker.
My question is, will K-Rod's multi-million dollar snuff be remembered as much as "The Punch?"
The real shot to the dome, as we recall, was the bone-shattering Haymaker that Kermit Washington delivered to Rudy Tomjanovich in a 1977 NBA game between the Lakers and the Houston Rockets.
It was perhaps one of the scariest moments ever witnessed in American sports.
Washington's immense punch cased the top half of Rudy T's skull to come out of alignment and nearly killed the man.
K-Rod made a boneheaded mistake. Noquestion. But in no way is his cowardly swat comparable to "The Punch."