When the season is over, Jim Boeheim will reflect on Syracuse’s 25-0 start to the season – the best mark in school history.

But for now, that’s not on his mind at all.

“I’m really happy that we’ve won 25 games,” Boeheim said. “That’s a great thing, but we can’t be thinking about that.”

After No. 1 Syracuse’s (25-1, 12-1 Atlantic Coast) stunning 62-59 overtime loss to Boston College (7-19, 3-10), the head coach brushed aside all questions related to the historic start. He’s been worrying about his team’s poor play for weeks, and it finally came back to bite the Orange on Wednesday night.

“You don’t get any trophies that matter in the regular season,” he said after Syracuse eked out a win over North Carolina State. “The only thing that matters is what you do at the end of the year. The real end of the year.”

Boeheim said it’s been an unbelievable run full of unbelievable plays in the final seven minutes.

“We’ve had a lot of good teams,” Boeheim said, “but I don’t think we’ve had any teams that would have won all these games at the end the way this team has.

“It’s remarkable what they’ve done, but the time to think about all that is when the season’s over.”

For a team where a national championship didn’t — and still doesn’t — seem farfetched, Syracuse hasn’t been playing like a Final Four contender of late. That’s Boeheim’s main focus — figuring out how to get his team to play better.

There’s no mental grind, Boeheim said. No pressure, either. Pressure comes when you don’t have enough wins, he said, not when you have more than you should. This team has consistently won games it wasn’t supposed to.

For now, Syracuse simply needs to generate more offense. Boeheim said Syracuse has been in trouble in 11 games during conference play. That’s just who his team is.

It’s not like SU has cruised through seven or eight games and had two close ones. Syracuse has escaped from closely contested games it seemed destined to lose. On Wednesday, though, it finally happened – and against a team that had six wins.

“It was just shocking knowing that we lost a home game,” Syracuse forward C.J. Fair said. “I thought we were two stops away from sealing the game, but we didn’t.”

Typically, Boeheim said, a team loses its first game five, 10, 15 games into the season. That’s when you adjust. Now that time has rolled around, much later than usual.

As Fair put it, everyone in the SU locker room has lost a game before. Now the key is to move forward.

“We’re kind of woken up a little bit,” SU guard Tyler Ennis said. “We know we’re a team that’s beatable.

“We knew we weren’t going to go undefeated.”

Published on February 20, 2014 at 2:12 pm

Contact Trevor: tbhass@syr.edu | @TrevorHass