Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
When the door opened to the small passageway where Scott Nagy had stopped for the postmortems, the cheers from the Northern Kentucky fans out on the court and the sounds of “One Shining Moment” slipped into the room like a pair of out-of-place revelers.
When the door shut again, the music stopped, the crowd noise disappeared and Nagy was left to the silence again.
That’s the way it was for the Wright State coach and his team Tuesday night in Detroit after they were swept aside by a hot-shooting NKU team, 77-66, in the Horizon League championship game at Little Caesars Arena.
The Norse now were headed to the NCAA Tournament.
Wright State — which had hoped to make history in a couple of ways Tuesday — was denied.
There would be no back-to-back trips to college basketball’s premier tournament. Nor would the WSU men be joining the Raiders’ women — who were headed to the NCAA Tournament after out-battling Green Bay, 55-52, in the afternoon here — for what would have been the school’s first tournament twofer.
Now Nagy and his 21-13 team would head to the NIT, a destination that has plenty of merit in its own right, but at the moment was an invitation framed in players’ disappointment.
“It hurts right now,” Raiders point guard Cole Gentry said moments earlier. “We’ve got a good tournament still to play in, but that’s not what we wanted, not what we came here for. We came here to win.
“We’re going to have to get over the disappointment and regroup.”
Nagy shared some of those thoughts: “There’s a lot of pain and there should be. There’d be something wrong if there wasn’t.
“We do have a good tournament to go to, but one thing about the NIT: Everybody in it is a real good basketball team and none of them want to be in it. They all want to be in the NCAA Tournament. So the question is can you get past the disappointment? But at least we have a little more time to pull ourselves together."
