Based only on my observations and a few conversations with people who were there or watching, I think it’s been a while since a WVU loss in either sport hurt quite as much as Friday’s did. Certainly 13-9 transcends all of this and is more or less in a category of its own, but that was two years ago. Maybe the Kenton Paulino game before that?

There are other candidates from basketball (the Ronald Ramon shot in ’08, the Georgetown-Cincinnati double-whammy in ’08) and football (overtime against Cincinnati in ’08, Auburn this past season) but it just seems to me, admittedly on your periphery, this one was different.

This was about free throws, sure, but there was trouble elsewhere and it was a shame. WVU played so well for so long and then more or less stopped what it was doing. 

WVU led Pitt by 11 points late in the second half and then came up empty on six straight possessions – six missed jump shots, no offensive rebounds – while Pitt did nothing on five of its own.

“We played like we were losing,” Butler said. “We had a couple ill-advised shots we didn’t need to take that we took and that’s something you can’t do. You can’t give away possessions like that and come down and shoot a jump shot a step inside the 3-point line on the fast break. But that’s something we did. We weren’t very smart.”

And as gray and gloomy as things were, another unpredictable weekend in the Big East changed the mood. WVU looked as if it might not receive one of the four two-round byes for the Big East Tournament and Huggins admitted his team had only itself to blame for being  in “a really bad spot.”

But then Syracuse loses at home to Louisville and Georgetown falls on the road against Rutgers. The Orange brought the top closer to the second tier and Georgetown stepped out of the top four. Just like that, it can all change, which should be abundantly clear after Friday night.