Generally, the first cracks form and never go away. They grab hold, they splinter, they grow until you’re left with nothing but fragments.

And, to be sure, just a month ago, the Syracuse men’s soccer team had more cracks than the 700 block of East Adams Street.

After dropping early-season games to Virginia Commonwealth and Coastal Carolina, and later to woebegone Big East teams Providence and Villanova, the Orangemen were left with few realistic reasons to believe they could salvage the 2002 season. Syracuse needed a thorough pave job — and asphalt needs an offseason to dry.

Yet somehow, the Orangemen didn’t simply scrap this once-disastrous season and wait for next year. They didn’t remodel. They didn’t undergo the precipitous collapse of their football brethren.

Instead, as evidenced by Saturday’s impressive 1-1 tie with No. 3 St. John’s, SU took the early-season fragments and filled its cracks on the fly.

“I think we proved to ourselves,” Syracuse head coach Dean Foti said, “that we can play at that (high) level, which has been debatable at different times during the season.”

Debatable no longer. Syracuse now owns a nifty, four-game unbeaten streak, including the tie against the Red Storm and an earlier win over No. 14 Rutgers. With four games remaining in the season, the Orangemen are finally heading down a smooth path — one that will possibly run straight into a Big East tournament bid.

No doubt, Syracuse has its shortcomings. But perhaps SU’s greatest strength is that it never let mediocrity turn into failure.

Saturday against the third-best team in America, the Orangemen didn’t just tip-toe away with a lucky-to-escape, 1-1 tie. They uniformly dominated the second half and both overtime periods, outshooting the Red Storm, 15-3, over that span.

As regulation slipped away, Syracuse seemingly had jump-from-your-seat scoring chances at the top of every minute — enough, at least, to keep the rowdy Syracuse Soccer Stadium crowd of 1,066 standing and sitting more often than a Sunday Mass contingent.

“Obviously, it’s great to get a tie against the No. 3 team in the nation,” senior Ryan Hall said. “But with the circumstances of the game, you know you’re taking it to them, because you’re just pounding them and pounding them. It’s kind of frustrating in some sorts.”

Not as frustrating, though, when compared with the demoralizing stretch from a month ago. On Oct. 2, the Orangemen lost to Villanova, 3-1, and the early-season cracks looked like they’d gorge the team into destruction.

Out-of-shape players. Injuries. Underachieving veterans.

And suddenly — perhaps inexplicably — those worries were under a new layer of pavement.

“When we lost to Villanova,” Foti said, “that was a night that we came out and played really, really hard. The tendency would be for everyone to get really depressed, but at the end of that game, you could kind of see it in their eyes. They knew that they played well. And the next day, they were training hard, really going in practice, and that’s how things started to turn around.”

Said Hall: “That’s what set us up — we kind of sat back and re-evaluated our season. Pick any word you want, I’d call it disbelief that we were shooting ourselves in the foot again and again. But we’ve definitely bounced back.”

Why the turnaround? Some players suggest it’s because Foti switched to a new, defense-oriented formation. Some think a higher level of play results from the recent stretch of tough opponents. Others credit the growing confidence of team leaders.

When SU defender Ari Schneider lost his temper Saturday at a Red Storm player who was repeatedly tapping his ankles, fourth-year junior Chris Aloisi cupped his hands calmingly around Schneider’s face and asked for him to stay composed.

Schneider did, and so did Syracuse.

“Before the season,” Aloisi said, “Dean talked to us and said that we have a lot of talent, but it’s going to come from the seniors to put us all together. We might have been questioning that a little bit after losses to some lower opponents, but I think we’ve answered ourselves and everyone else with two good results these past two games.”

Who could blame the Orangemen if they never expected those good results to come this season? Few teams get enough breaks to halt the momentum of a disappointing year in midseason.

But SU, once just a few cracks short of a Sisqo video, has sealed its weaknesses. In the process, it might have found its greatest strength.

Chico Harlan is a staff writer at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear each Tuesday. E-mail him at apharlan@syr.edu.

Published on October 21, 2002 at 12:00 pm