CONVENTIONAL wisdom suggests that Temple's basketball team will lose another game at some point the rest of the way.
It could be Saturday, when the Owls go to Saint Joseph's with a chance to clinch the Big 5 title. It might be in the final Atlantic 10 Tournament in Atlantic City, where they cut down the nets in 2008, '09 and '10. Or maybe they will take a 17-game winning streak into the Madness. But for right now, they're getting it done about as well as anyone not named Kentucky or Syracuse.
They could have gone down last night, for the first time since Jan. 14, in their first outing since moving into Top 25 at No. 22. But they didn't, even though La Salle, which had been beaten only once at Gola Arena this season, rallied from 10 back in the last 4 minutes of regulation, scoring the last seven in the closing 1:44 (with the help of a technical foul on Temple's Ramone Moore for protesting a call), to force overtime. Then the Explorers turned a six-point deficit with 2 minutes to go in the extra period into a one-point game, and had the ball in Earl Pettis' hands on the final possession. The same guy who already had a career-high 33. His three-pointer from straightaway was long, but D.J. Peterson got the rebound and found Sam Mills in the left corner. And his trey looked good but also found nothing but iron.
So Temple survived, 80-79.
"We pretty much knew Pettis was going to shoot," said Khalif Wyatt, who was defending him. "He got a pretty good shot off. Thank God he missed it. Then they got another opportunity. And thank God he missed it.
"We got a couple of big leads, but they just kept fighting. It seemed like every time we made a run, they had answers."
Still, it wasn't quite enough for the Explorers, who have lost four of their last five, to get one they really could have used.
Pettis scored their final 13 in regulation, and five of their eight in OT.
"When I saw [Wyatt] back up, I took what was there," he said. "It felt good. I was looking to be aggressive. I was looking to make the play . . . Even though you're upset, you can't hang your heads too long."
"We were so close," added La Salle coach Dr. John Giannini. "The difference between winning and losing is minuscule. I think we did a lot of things right, to give ourselves a chance late.
