Pitt's season-ending win 'wasn't pretty, but it was beautiful'

When a team loses as much as Pitt did this season, it’s hard to feel like any lead is safe.

So as the Panthers clutched a lead that slid between five and 10 in the second half of Saturday’s regular-season finale against Notre Dame, there was never any certainty that they would actually pull it off.

Since optimism about the team hit a crescendo with an upset of Florida State, the decline had been abrupt, less a slide than an absolute fall. Home-and-home losses to Syracuse and Clemson, blowout losses to North Carolina, Duke and Virginia, gut-punch losses to Wake Forest, Boston College, Georgia Tech and Miami - it all added up to a 13-game losing streak that left Pitt at the bottom of the ACC.

The Panthers had opportunities in that stretch. Games were there to be won, but too much youth among the team’s talented players and not enough talent among the team’s experienced players, Jeff Capel’s group couldn’t quite pull it off.

Instead, the first-year coach’s squad endured blow after blow until Saturday’s game against Notre Dame started looking less like an opportunity for a win and more like a merciful end to a brutal season. And even when Pitt had a 10-point lead midway through the second half against the Irish, there was an uneasy feeling among the 8,000 or so in the Petersen Events Center.

They had seen the team get close before. They had seen the team be in position to win before. And they had seen the team blow it on more than a few occasions.

So when the lead started dipping below 10, the anxiety grew, just as it did when Notre Dame made it a one-point game multiple times in the final three minutes, or when Xavier Johnson committed a double dribble, or when Johnson and Trey McGowens combining to miss three free throws, or when the Irish grabbed two offensive rebounds to extend a possession in the final 40 seconds.

Tension grew, but on this afternoon, in the final game at the Petersen Events Center until next fall, Pitt held on and beat Notre Dame 56-53.

“We talked before the game about putting a period on this,” Capel said after the game. “And we’ve been good this year - if you look at our record, you don’t think that, but I know the things and the progress that we’ve made. We talked about putting a period at the end of this paragraph right now, and we did that. So it was big for us, for this team, for what we’re trying to do going forward as we build the program to put a period on the end of it.”

The game was sealed when freshman Trey McGowens stole the ball from Notre Dame center John Mooney outside the arc with 15 seconds left, leading Mooney to foul. If the game was a much-desired “period” on the season as Capel said, it also served as such for McGowens individually. The promising freshman had been in an epic slump since helping power Pitt to its two previous ACC victories, but he came alive on Saturday, closing out the first half with a huge combination of a monster dunk over Mooney - who had a six-inch height advantage - and then hitting a three.

McGowens finished with 16 points, the most he has scored since he put 30 on FSU in that win back in January.

“The reality is, we hadn’t won since he hadn’t played well,” Capel said. “So he is very important for us because it gives us another scorer. Look, we’ve struggled to score; that’s been one of our biggest things. And I knew that coming in, that that could be an issue. Earlier, Trey and Xavier kind of - especially the first four conference games, they helped put us in a position where we had a chance to win two of them, had a chance to win three of them and we won two. But when he started to struggle, I don’t think that that’s a coincidence that it coincided with us starting to struggle, or with us struggling, I should say.”

McGowens added two assists, two steals, three rebounds and a block on his stat line Saturday. Johnson similarly filled the stat sheet with 10 points, six assists, five rebounds, two steals and just three turnovers. He didn’t shoot well with a 4-of-14 line, but he was huge down the stretch, scoring Pitt’s final six points in the game to seal the win.

With that one in the bag, the Panthers finish the regular season at 13-18 overall and 3-15 in the ACC. Notre Dame, in uncharacteristically down year for Mike Brey, has the same records, and Saturday’s game was certainly not a match of conference heavyweights.

The results reflected the quality of the teams playing in it. Both Pitt and Notre Dame shot under 40% from the floor and hit a combined 14 of 23 free throws. Both teams showed signs of the issues that had dogged them this season.

But baskets, not style, earned the points, and when the final buzzer sounded, the Panthers were ahead.

“It wasn’t pretty, but it was beautiful for us in the end to be on this side of it again,” Capel said. “It’s been a long time.”

Now Pitt will head into next week’s ACC Tournament in Charlotte as the No. 14 seed after Saturday’s win moved the Panthers a spot ahead of Notre Dame. They’ll face No. 11 seed Boston College in the 7 p.m. game on Tuesday, with the winner facing the No. 6 seed - most likely Syracuse - at 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday night.