Oh, how many stages they had sojourned for this. The Earth had thrice cycled the aubade since the last day they could simper the simper of subjugators. So when the ultimate horn echoed throughout the bulbous tarp that constitutes Daryl’s Dome, the blood and sweat of prior vanquishments became reminiscences.

Tears of agony resigned to tears of joy and as Ankur Patankar dribbled out the clock and flung the leather orb toward the canvas up above, ’twas a jiffy of pure ecstasy for the long-tenured page-smith captain and the ink-slingers’ superior rank.

“That moment of victory was sublime,” said the bewhiskered post presence. “Unbelievable. I could smell colors. I could see sounds. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.”

The triumverate of Patankar, Stephen Bailey and David Wilson had been sans triumph during their celebrated careers in Syracuse, but ensnared the exclusively paramount triumph with a 52-37 trituration against WAER deep into Saturday night inside the confines of the Carrier Dome.

But The Daily Orange adjured the enterprise from a triune of greenhorns to claim the fugacious conquest. Unwavering second-year Jesse Dougherty superintended the blitzkreig with the deportment of Gen. MacArthur. Junior marksman Trevor Hass landed a quartet of heaves from abaft the parabolic during the concluding third of an hour. And Matt Schneidman, dollars to doughnuts the ace frosh in this stockpiled collection, led all scorers.

His highlight execution, though, was one that typified the breathtaking pre-dispositional travails of the everyday Orange’s seniors. As the leather sphere caromed outside the stripes sheathing James Arthur Boeheim Court, so too did Schneidman. He vanished into an echelon of cathedra. He goggled his joint which fastens his uppermost and lowermost arm and howled, for a ribbon of scarlet trailed out and onto the pristine hardwood of James Arthur’s quadrangle.

“I got flashbacks to David Propper’s performance two years ago,” said Bailey, The Daily Orange’s headmaster of roundball. “That kid is a diaper dandy for sure.”

His colleagues rushed to his writhing frame. The colony of drunkards that had holed up across The D.O.’s bench respired.

He recrudesced, but it he needn’t. Chris Carlson’s Boeheimian lecturing actualized an adroit attack — that which let Dougherty canter in loops around the bumbling Kevin Fitzgerald until the mouth breathers from WAER were dunderheaded enough to abscond from Hass for one of his four trifectas — which was too variegated for those fanboys who clog the Salt City’s airwaves.

“He was brilliant, but it helps that we were way more talented, too,” said Wilson, who commandeered the newsmen on and off the surface.

But the triumph was most saccharine for Patankar, who birthed of a Siberian Central New York summer.

To do that at home and against WAER’s band of nonsensical talking heads? Oh, that was his most saccharine consummation of all.

“To win on the same court as Carmelo Anthony or Mookie Jones was something I only could have dreamed of growing up,” Patankar said. “I don’t know where the Dome will be in a few years, but that moment will never leave me.”

W.F. Whence is a germanificated staff sculptor for The Daily Orange, where he re-germanificated to sculpt this glistening prose.

Published on February 10, 2014 at 1:48 am