Men decked in orange spilled off a brown and beige charter bus into a parking lot nestled behind Smith Hall. Some stretched their legs and took a deep breath of frigid Syracuse air, while others cracked open beers and took long drags from cigarettes.

It was 10 a.m., but it didn’t matter what time it was. They were here to celebrate their hero: a hero 20 to 30 years younger than they. It was Gerry McNamara’s last regular season basketball game at the Carrier Dome, and Sunday morning would be damned if they couldn’t enjoy it.

It all started at 8 a.m. Buses, 68 of them, covered the streets of Scranton. There wasn’t a set meeting point or a bus station, just buses all across the city. Get on one and go see the pride of Scranton in Syracuse for the last time.

Sunday wasn’t the day to visit Scranton. The mini-mart owner, the mechanic and all the business owners were in Syracuse. As one Scranton native put it, on Sunday, Syracuse was Scranton.

And it wasn’t just the usual suspects who made the two-hour drive on Interstate-81 North to see McNamara and the Orange.

The flood of Scrantonites was proud to make its native son’s Senior Day a record-setting one. A NCAA on-campus record 33,633 watched McNamara score 29 points in a 92-82 Syracuse loss to No. 4 Villanova.

There was Brian Sheriean, who watched or listened to every Syracuse basketball game since McNamara’s been on campus, but never made the trek to Central New York.

He’s been enthralled with the SU senior since a 12-year-old McNamara tore apart the team Sheriean coached. It was the only time he’s been against McNamara.

‘Best court vision of anyone I’ve ever seen,’ Sheriean said. ‘You could see he was star quality when he was 12 years old.’

Since that game, Sheriean figured McNamara would have a big effect wherever he went, but he never imagined one day the kid with the court vision would attract so many buses to University Place in Syracuse, making the university look more like downtown Scranton.

‘The city is empty,’ Sheriean said. ‘If you ever wanted to rob Scranton, today’s the day.’

Although it was Sheriean’s first time to see McNamara in the Carrier Dome, he quickly realized why people have taken the trip for four years. He’s seen McNamara’s popularity grow from packing the gymnasium at Bishop Hannan High School five years ago to packing 68 buses to see the guard’s final regular season game.

‘He’s the hometown hero,’ Gary Gianacopoulos said. ‘He’s bigger than anybody to come out of Scranton. All these buses come to support a Scranton legend.’

Not only did McNamara draw Scranton’s basketball fans to Syracuse, he even had Scrantonites who never watched basketball following his every move. Such was the case for Pete Kulenich, a lifelong resident of Scranton.

This was Kulenich’s first time watching McNamara in Syracuse, too. He’d heard about the magic of seeing McNamara play in the Carrier Dome and thought there was no better time to see what it was all about than McNamara’s last game.

‘I wish they would’ve won,’ Kulenich said. ‘It would’ve been a better sendoff. He played well, though. It’s been a good trip. It’s good to see people support Gerry.’

And people did support Gerry. Aided by the new courtside seats and the absence of ESPN’s College Gameday set, which ate up a large chunk of seats when the previous record of 33,199 was set in Feb. 2005, Sunday’s crowd packed the Carrier Dome to the far reaches of the upper deck.

Following the game, steady streams of people made their way back to the buses. After taking a brief moment to absorb the Syracuse campus and figure out which of the buses was theirs, they quietly boarded their buses after seeing what Gianacopoulos called ‘the biggest thing to come out of Scranton’ for the last time. It was a solemn procession, but McNamara was more optimistic.

‘I’ve said it over and over how easy it is to adapt to Syracuse and for Syracuse to accept me is because the fans made it feel like home – the people from Scranton made it feel like home,’ McNamara said. ‘That’s really what made my time here special, not just fans from Scranton, but fans from Syracuse. I think there’s a relationship between the two now. Hopefully the fans from Scranton keep coming up here.’

Published on March 4, 2006 at 12:00 pm