So watching all of these holiday tournaments got me thinking about NU's '82 team that lost in triple OT to Villanova at the Nassau Coliseum.

Found this article online after their win over St. Joe's ...

Northeastern Strikes Again

By Malcolm Moran, Special To the New York Times
March 14, 1982

The morning after one of the most important basketball games a team from Northeastern University has ever won, Coach Jim Calhoun and three of his Huskies were changing a flat tire on their rented car. Afterward, the Huskies smiled at the thought. They are accustomed to life's small indignities by now.

Friday night, Northeastern, the 11th-seeded team among the 12 in the East region of the national collegiate tournament, defeated St. Joseph's, 63-62, to advance to a second-round game against Villanova. They will play in the first game of a doubleheader Sunday at Nassau Coliseum, before St. John's and Alabama play for a spot in the regional semifinal against top-ranked North Carolina.

Minutes after the Northeastern victory, as the celebration was just beginning for the students who had filled 12 buses for the trip from Huntington Avenue in Boston, Calhoun encountered a security guard as he walked under the stands toward the room where reporters were waiting.

The security guard examined the white competitor's tag that hung by a string from Calhoun's belt. ''That's not the right pass,'' the guard said.

Calhoun smiled. Jack Grinold, a veteran Northeastern employee, tried to explain that this was the coach whose team had just won the game. This was the person that all those other people down the hall were waiting to see.

''Nobody gets in there,'' the guard said. Finally, the guard relented. ''I have such great visibility in New York,'' Calhoun said. Bedlam in Boston

In Boston, where the visibility has not been much better, there was little mistaken identity when the news reached the crowd at Boston Garden. The hockey Huskies had just scored the winning goal in the third period of a playoff game against New Hampshire when the basketball score was announced.

Fans jumped and screamed. Hockey players jumped on the bench. ''People don't know what to think,'' said Fred Hannigan, a bartender in the Cask and Flagon, speaking by phone from one of the pubs near the Northeastern campus.

Except for the basketball players. A year ago, the Huskies defeated 20th-ranked Fresno State in a first-round game at El Paso, Tex. Little Northeastern, the Huskies were called, despite their enrollment at a university with more than 20,000 full-time students.


Few of those students could make it to El Paso. ''It was us and the cheerleaders,'' said Perry Moss, the senior guard who scored 24 points against St. Joseph's. ''And the five band members. Fresno had about a 30-piece band and the whole Red Wave section.

''We beat Fresno, it was a dream come true,'' Moss said. ''We were on a cloud. We were saying, 'If we do this and this and this, we'd be in the Final Four.' It was a dream. We went out against Utah and got shocked back into reality. This year, since we've been there before, we're not on that cloud. It's like this is step one. This year, we pretty much have everything in perspective.''

So at 1 o'clock this morning, instead of continuing the celebration, Calhoun was on the telephone trying to get some information about Villanova. Problems for St. Jophn's

That is the same problem that faced Lou Carnesecca, the St. John's coach, after the Redmen (21-8) ended Pennsylvania's 14-game winning streak.

Alabama defeated St. John's in the National Invitation Tournament last year, but with the addition of two important freshmen, Ennis Whatley, a 6-3 guard, and Bobby Lee Hurt, a 6-9 center, the Redmen will be playing a different team.

''I know they have three guys who played against us last year, and two good freshmen,'' Carnesecca said. ''They pound the boards hard. They just beat Kentucky. And they're from Alabama.''

The Huskies share the Northeastern Arena, the renovated building once known as the Boston Arena, with the hockey team. ''The hockey games are always packed,'' Moss said. ''Our games are semipacked.''

He was being kind. In a city where the Celtics are the hot ticket and Boston College and the Big East Conference command most of the college basketball attention, the Huskies (23-6) have won 66 games in the last three seasons, partly because of Moss, and partly from the conviction that one does not have to be large to get rebounds.

The Huskies outrebounded St. Joseph's, 35-26, despite giving up 4 inches at the center position. Mark Halsel, the 6-6 sophomore, had 13 rebounds.

''We wanted to build the program so we wouldn't be confused with Northwestern,'' Moss said. That chance comes tomorrow. ''I know what it means, and you know what it means,'' Calhoun said. He looked toward his players. ''But I hope they don't know what it means.'

Of the three games mentioned the one I remember the least was the St Joe's win ....probably because of how the other two ended. At Villanova it was Leto failing NU for the first of several times missing multiple game winning layups. In the Fresno game it was a young Bob Ley describing a last second jump ball that we needed to win. It was Perry Moss against a taller Fresno player and Ley was saying that Moss was limping badly as he headed to the jump circle. When the ball was tossed up Moss soared up and pulled it in and Ley kept saying, "Moss sandbagged him! He sandbagged him!"