His players trudged onto the field, their heads bowed and their nerves frayed after Friday night’s near comeback, which started a bit too late and ended a bit too early. We’ll get to the reason for that in a moment, but first, understand that John Desko looked content. He clapped his hands together, short and crisp, a tranquil look on his face following No. 2 Syracuse’s 13-12 loss to No. 1 Virginia.

Sure, his team lost. But the Orange skittered and turned the ball over too often, slumped through the third quarter and still found itself with a chance to take the best team in the country to overtime. Syracuse should know now that its team is pretty good. The Carrier Dome crowd swayed and reminded Desko of those old massive audiences taking in the Gait brothers. Folks stayed to the wild end, reveled in it, and then afterwards most everyone agreed that this game didn’t mean all that much. It was a fun night. These two teams will probably meet again at the final four, so Desko could take heart.

‘The silver lining,’ he said, ‘would be that the guys showed a lot of character and a lot of heart by never quitting and scoring to get us back in the game.’

But why so late? Well, there’s one problem.

Faceoffs. It’s hard to rally without the ball.

If we learned anything Friday night, we now know, for sure, what the biggest issue will be this season for the Orange. The squad knew they needed to replace a Tewaaraton Trophy-winning attack, a prolific midfield scorer, a pair of captain close defenders and the nation’s best faceoff man from last year’s national championship team.

Kenny Nims showed up a bit late to the party, but he scored three goals in that frantic fourth quarter, an almost-homage to Mike Leveille’s 2008 heroics. In the midfield, Dan Hardy is rounding into the role Steven Brooks once held. Defender John Lade limited Virginia’s All-American attack Danny Glading to a hat trick, which is really all you can ask.

One problem.

No one has replaced Danny Brennan.

Look, it’s not fair to hang this loss solely on the Orange’s four-man faceoff committee, but facts are facts. The crew of Jake Moulton, Scott Kahoe, Josh Knight and Tim Harder can’t yet replicate Brennan’s 67 percent winning percentage from last year. On Friday night, Syracuse won just 12-of-29 draws. With fewer possessions, the Orange offense never settled in. The Cavaliers controlled the game’s tempo until that final five-minute scramble.

‘I think they did a much better job than we did in that area,’ Desko said, ‘and that’s why you saw them playing a lot of offense today.’

Now, it’s not like Virginia dominated the Orange in the X. But that’s the thing. Last year, Danny Brennan was dominant. He kept things rolling. Trailing wasn’t a big deal – he converted comebacks into games of make-it, take-it:

In a 14-13 come-from-behind regular season victory over Johns Hopkins, Brennan won the last seven faceoffs.

In an 11-9 national quarterfinal win over Notre Dame, Brennan won 17-of-24.

And against Virginia at the final four, Brennan won 19-of-27 as SU clawed its way into the national championship game.

If Brennan loses those draws, Syracuse probably loses those games. ‘Everybody knows it’s important,’ Kevin Donahue, the assistant coach in charge of the faceoff unit, told The Daily Orange last year. ‘Just by looking at it on the surface, you’ll see that it’s a two-goal swing every time there’s a faceoff won.’

That’s why, on Friday, Virginia outshot SU 49-34 and milked the clock on possessions.

That’s why Syracuse’s offense sometimes played too fast for its own good. ‘When our defense is down playing the whole time,’ Nims said, ‘we try not to go to the cage real fast and create turnovers, but it’s kind of tough not to.’

And that is why the comeback started so late.

Until someone becomes Brennan, the comebacks will start later. If they ever get started.

That could be a problem.

Andy McCullough is the enterprise editor for The Daily Orange, where his columns appear occasionally. You can reach him at ramccull@syr.edu

Published on March 1, 2009 at 12:00 pm