A tired Villanova team needs to get refreshed to make a March Madness run | Mike Sielski

His back healthy enough for him to stand in front of a rotunda full of Villanova alumni and boosters, Jermaine Samuels rose for a few remarks Sunday night and immediately harked to the very recent past. CBS had just revealed that the Wildcats would be the No. 2 seed in the South Regional of this year’s NCAA Tournament, would face No. 15 Delaware in Pittsburgh this Friday. But the championship that he and his teammates had won the night before was still on Samuels’ mind.

“Thanks for coming to Madison Square Garden,” he said to the crowd at Finneran Pavilion. “It was extremely electric in there.”

Those last two nights in New York – the Garden full and throbbing with sound, Villanova edging Connecticut in the semifinals Friday and Creighton in the final Saturday – were the opposite of the subdued atmosphere that’s likely awaiting the Wildcats at PPG Paints Arena next weekend. Nothing beats the Big East Tournament as a March setting for this sport, and even Jay Wright spent several minutes late Saturday night rhapsodizing about the marvelousness of it all: the national anthem and a trumpeter at the beginning, Sinatra and confetti at the end, the history and passion throughout.

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Compared with that scene, compared with the thrill of coming out of that crucible as a champion, any early-round games in the NCAAs are a library study hall. That’s why, once the party dispersed Sunday, Wright’s first order of business was to meet with his players and remind them to leave that sweet success behind them, to separate themselves from it.

“That’s the challenge,” he said. “People are still talking about it, the excitement of the tournament, the expectations. We have to break away from all of that. We have to focus on getting better this week, and then prepare for Delaware.

“It sounds like an easy thing to do, but when you go through that experience at Madison Square Garden, when you’re in that excitement and you come down from that and people talk, hyping you up, you’ve got to get yourself refocused. It concerns me. It’s something we’ve done before, but we’ve got to work at it.”

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Delaware was the fifth-best in the Colonial Athletic Association this season, unimposing even for an underdog. So the bigger worry for Wright and the Wildcats isn’t a first-round upset Friday but that second-round game Sunday against the winner of Ohio State-Loyola of Chicago. But preparation is always a delicate balance for a program that is arguably the nation’s finest but, not too long ago, was burdened by a tendency to lose in the tournament before anyone expected it would.

In 2015, Villanova rolled through The Big East Tournament, beating Xavier by 17 points in the title game, then as a No. 1 seed crushed Lafayette to coast into the NCAAs’ second round, only to lose to No. 8 North Carolina State. “I kind of felt like we ran out of gas,” Wright said. “We stayed on a high the whole time.”

A similar danger remains real for these Wildcats. They didn’t return from New York until Sunday morning. “It’s exhausting,” Wright said. “We’re exhausted today.” They’ve had their share of injuries this season already, and Samuels just served as the consummate example of the sacrifices that a player is willing to make to keep himself from missing the magic and competition at Madison Square Garden – of the toll that one particular conference tournament can take.

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The day before Villanova’s quarterfinal game against St. John’s, Samuels curled his 6-foot-7 body and hunched his back to fit into a cold tub. The next morning, at the Wildcats’ walk-through, he bent down to tie his sneakers, felt three crackles in his back, and suddenly couldn’t move.

Ibuprofen, heat, stretching, riding a stationary bike: Samuels ran the gamut of treatments before toughing out 26 minutes against St. John’s. After Jonathan Kropf, Villanova’s team chiropractor, arrived in New York late Friday afternoon for several rounds of hands-on care, Samuels scored 21 points against UConn and played another 24 minutes against Creighton. He was damned if he was going to sit out those Garden games, but it’s foolish to think there’s not a possible price to pay for such commitment.

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“The main thing is something we’ve been preaching all year, which is staying 94-by-50 and focusing on what we can control between the lines and not worrying about anything around us,” Samuels said. “There’s a lot of distractions at Madison Square Garden. That’s the beauty of the NCAA Tournament. We get a chance to keep it between the lines.”

Yes, that’s the beauty and blessing of March, and that’s the mission for Wright and Samuels and Villanova now. To take care it doesn’t become a curse.