By Ben Dickison, Sports Editor

In Ed Cooley’s first trip to Cintas as head man of the Georgetown Hoyas program, his team took the favored Xavier Musketeers to the final possession in one of many thrillers across the Big East Conference last weekend.

Cooley claimed in the postgame, “Georgetown’s coming… I think that was the best game we’ve played all season,”

Georgetown point guard Jayden Epps, who finished with 32 points and 11 assists, and forward Ismael Massoud both knocked down two three-pointers in the first six minutes of action. The Hoyas used lights out shooting to propel to an 11-3 lead to open the game.

On Xavier’s final offensive possession of the Butler game, graduate student guard Quincy Olivari connected on Xavier’s tenth three point make of the game, rewarding every fan in the Cincinnati area with a free eight count nugget from Chick-fil-A. With around seven minutes left in the first half Olivari continued the quest for chicken nuggets for the second consecutive game by draining his second three of the night. Sophomore guard Desmond Claude, who is averaging 23 points per game over the last three games, then forced a turnover and senior guard Dayvion McKnight cashed in from deep.

With just over four minutes left in th,e half, Xavier’s staff turned up the heat, adjusting the defense to a 2-2-1 trapping press. 6’ 7” freshman  Dailyn Swain tipped a pass from Georgetown guard Dontrez Styles and led the break. On that possession, the Musketeers cut the deficit to four on a score of 35 to 39 on senior forward Gytis Nemeikša’s layup.

Xavier found themselves trailing 43-38 at the intermission. At the break, the Hoyas had hit three point shots at a 76 percent clip.

Massoud and fellow Georgetown forwards Drew Fielder and Supreme Cook had all tallied three personal fouls before the first media timeout of the second half. Xavier found themselves in an uphill battle to draw even with the Hoyas until each team found itself with 66 points with 10 minutes left in the game.

First year guard Trey Green cashed in from deep with nine minutes remaining to give Xavier a 69-66 lead. This make was immediately countered by a slew of production from Georgetown on foul shots, as they converted on all nine attempts from the stripe after Green’s lone three-point make of the evening.

As the game entered the final “four-minute war,” the metric by which Miller denotes segments of each game, Xavier was shrinking the offensive court for the Hoyas with flying colors. 

With three and a half minutes left in regulation, Xavier found themselves trailing 82-85. In the last minutes,  the teams exchanged baskets in the paint. Epps and Cook scored for Georgetown, while Claude and senior guard Dayvion McKnight converted for Xavier.

Claude narrowed the lead to one on a superhuman layup over guards Dontre Styles and Wayne Bristol Jr. with 1:19 remaining. Jayden Epps then trotted the ball down the court and was fouled by Claude, converting on the double bonus. Claude answered with a left-handed lay-in himself. That was precisely when Dailyn Swain wrote his chapter of the pageturner that is this 2023-24 Xavier men’s basketball season. 

Epps diced his way into the lane, but his attempt to convert a lefty lay-in was futile. Swain grabbed the rebound and threw an outlet pass to McKnight. McKnight zipped a pass to Claude on the left wing, spurring him to penetrate the defense. Once he entered the paint, Swain made himself available on the right wing, and Claude made an acrobatic dish to him. Swain disconcerted his defender with a pump fake, took one dribble and punished the rim with a two handed-slam, giving Xavier the lead with 11 seconds remaining, and sending Cintas Center into pandemonium. 

Swain finished with seven points, five assists and six rebounds. 

“He impacted tonight’s game in a way he has not impacted a game all season,” Miller said about Swain’s performance.

On Georgetown’s final possession, Miller recalls thinking, “We might lose this game, but (Epps) is not shooting,” 

 Miller’s prediction proved true.In their final defensive possession of the game, Swain joined Epps’s primary defender, Desmond Claude, to form the first half court trap Xavier had designed all night. Epps dished to senior guard Jay Heath, who grew up minutes from Georgetown’s campus. Heath’s floater attempt ever so slightly careened off of the back of the rim and into the hands of Xavier senior center Abou Ousmane.

As the men in white dribbled the clock down to triple zeroes, the win’s impact on the Musketeer’s place in the Big East standings was still clouded, as the majority of league games were to be played the following afternoon.

Not a soul could have predicted the way the Big East’s intraconference matchups played out on Saturday. Marquette brought St. John’s skipper Rick Pitino to his knees in defeat after escaping Madison Square Garden with a 77-76 victory. Conference frontrunner UConn could not wait to get out of Villanova’s Finneran Pavilion after eking out a 66-65 victory. in perhaps the game of the year in college hoops to this point in the season, Creighton conquered a road victory in Prudential Center over Seton Hall in three overtimes. When the dust cleared on a frenzied weekend around the conference, Xavier found itself resting in sixth place in the standings with a 4-3 record against Big East foes.

This week, Xavier stares down the barrel of a challenging brace of away games. The Musketeers travel to the heartland of Omaha, Nebraska to tussle with the Creighton Bluejays, who round out the current Big East standings podium. Then, on Sunday, the Musketeers are slated for a rematch with UConn in Hartford. The Musketeers fell to 1-3 in conference play with a 75-80 loss at the hands of the Huskies in Cintas Center on Jan. 10.

In the face of two ranked matchups this week, Miller calmly remarked, “They are all big games for us, because I feel like we are in the best conference in America…It’s just the next game for us.”