This loss will linger all summer for Bulls

It's about eight months before the University of South Florida gets to play a basketball game again.

That's eight months to think about what got away Tuesday night at the Sun Dome. Eight months to consider the ways the 58-57 loss to North Carolina State in the first round of the National Invitation Tournament might have turned out differently, or how a season that went so well could end with such a thud.

Teams lose games all the time, but during the season there's always a chance for redemption in a couple of days. Not so this time. This one tasted lousy going down and the bad taste is bound to linger.

"It's going to motivate me," Bulls coach Stan Heath said. "It's going to motivate those players. It's going to put a fire in my belly for the rest of the year, to remember North Carolina State. Remember Notre Dame, remember St. John's (during the regular season).

"I'll remember so many games where (if we won) we could have gone to the NCAA Tournament or gone farther in the NIT. It's going to put a burning fire in my belly and that's the only way I'm going to look at it."

He'll think about how the game may have turned on a malfunctioning clock.

Down by a point, N.C. State inbounded the ball under USF's basket with 11 seconds remaining. Neither the shot clock nor the game clock started, though, and the officials didn't notice it until Richard Howell scored what proved to be the game-winning basket. After sifting through a TV review, the score was allowed and eight seconds were left in the game.

Heath, still angry afterward, said the officials should have stopped play and started over as soon as the clock mess-up was discovered. It was just another drop of stomach acid on a heartburn night.

Dominique Jones, so magnificent so many times this season, has eight months to think about his struggle in this game from both the floor and the free-throw line. He had a game-high 24 points for the Bulls, including what could have been the game-winning basket with 41 seconds left.

Everything was a struggle, though.

"That's exactly what we were trying to do - just make him work," Wolfpack coach Sidney Lowe said. "He's a tremendous talent. He's strong and obviously aggressive inside. We just wanted to make him work. We wanted to make him see bodies. This was going to have to be a team defensive effort.

"We knew we weren't going to stop him - he's too good to stop. But everything he had, we wanted him to work for in hopes maybe he'd tire out a little bit."

Jones left seven points on the free-throw line, making only eight of the 15 foul shots he tried.

"Just terrible," he said.

He briefly mentioned something about next season with the Bulls and was quickly asked if that means he has decided to forgo the NBA and return to USF.

"No comment," he said.

USF achieved more this season than anyone believed possible at the outset. By breaking even in the Big East and going to a national tournament for the first time since 2002, the Bulls believe their days as a conference doormat are over.

Certainly, the level of respect they achieved both in the league and around college basketball was gratifying for a program that has had precious little of that.

"I'm really proud of this group. They've come a long way," Heath said. "They've done a lot of things that haven't been done before (here) and we've done a lot of things I'm very proud about. I hope this is a strong foundation for our future.

"It's disappointing that we had to end on a sour note like this because we had this game in hand, there's no doubt in my mind. They played well but we were the better team."

He shook his head, the disappointment obvious.

One thing that has to improve is the crowd. Just 3,502 fans showed for the game, and while they made enough noise to make you think their number was much larger, it still proves that USF has a long way to go to get the kind of consistent support it needs for basketball.

That's something else to think about over the next eight months.

There were a lot of things that might have been for this team.

All things considered, though, what the Bulls had in this most unexpected season of achievement was awfully good, too.