Saint Peter’s: the tiny college taking on basketball giants and winning

A college basketball team strolled into the gym for a most unlikely practice on Tuesday – unlikely because the team was Saint Peter’s, the small school bound for the NCAA Sweet Sixteen, and because nine television cameras and nine microphones awaited.

Everyone loves a Cinderella story in the NCAA Tournament, the knockout competition that ends the college basketball season and pits tiny schools like Saint Peter’s against behemoths with budgets in the tens of millions, like Duke and Kentucky. Perhaps even more so now that a horrid war is raging halfway across the world and Americans are still pretty much split into two snarling factions. The Saint Peter’s Peacocks offer a break, a getaway. All of America eats this stuff up.

Saint Peter’s are just the third No15 seed in NCAA Tournament history to earn a spot in a regional final, which for the Peacocks will be this weekend in Philadelphia. They won’t be favored to go to the Final Four, let alone win a game, but they are a nice story for now.

The word “surreal” was floating around a lot during a brief news conference. Doug Edert, a junior guard who grew up 10 miles away but knew nothing about Saint Peter’s until he was offered a scholarship there, smiled and said, “That’s exactly how it feels. It’s too good to describe with words.”

He added, “I’m just going with the flow right now. I don’t think it’s hit me yet, what’s going on.”

NCAA giantkilling stories are so compelling because they are all so different. Saint Peter’s is even better. As the crow flies, the campus is five miles from the Empire State Building but is jammed in among the lively but unglamorous clutter of Jersey City.

As champion of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, Saint Peter’s had been in three NCAA