Big East is the REAL tournament

Let's not rankle the networks, the seeding committee and the bracketologists by telling them. But around here, we all know that the Big East Tournament is better than the NCAA Tournament.

The Big East, which finished its weeklong festival at the Garden Saturday night with Connecticut beating Louisville, 69-66, has it all over The Big Dance because of the noise, the fans, the electricity and, yes, the basketball.

No offense to the purists, but the NCAA is partly about rooting for Cinderellas and mostly about following your bracket picks in the office pool. The Big East Tournament is sheer competition and great hoops.

Coaches would tell you this if they wanted to risk being brutally honest. In fact, Villanova coach Jay Wright has said it. He likes the Big East Tournament better because everybody knows everybody and every team has alumni in the stands. Notice that no one ever tanks it to get ready for the NCAA. Everybody in it wants to win it, even if they have to go through what Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun calls a "meat grinder" of five games in five days.

If ever there were to be a down year for the Big East Tournament, it would have been this one, with virtually nothing at stake but a trophy. Eleven NCAA bids looked likely for the Big East at the start of the week. There was almost no chance any other team could play its way in and little chance anyone was going to play their way out (although Villanova might have shot itself in the foot against South Florida).

You want to make a case for drama in Notre Dame, second seed in the Big East, trying to become a No. 1 seed in the NCAA? Go ahead. I didn't buy in.

Still, it was a delicious spectacle, with the Rutgers-St. John's crazy ending, with MVP Kemba Walker winning games and setting records, with Louisville's team defense locking down Notre Dame. The final buzzer of the final game came just after the potential tying shot caromed off the rim.

Not to say the whole thing is idyllic. Like all the other conference tournaments, the Big East's is held, first and foremost, to make money. Also, with the national championship looming, the conference event lacks the win-or-you're- done urgency that makes single-elimination so compelling.

That said, it still is a terrific show. And it's not just a show. The conference tournament has evolved into an organic part of basketball, up from the days when the Atlantic Coast Conference started holding a postseason tournament to determine its one entry in the NCAA.

"There are four stages to a season," St. John's coach Steve Lavin said. "There's your exhibition, non-conference, and that's a building block for conference play. Conference play is a building block for your conference tournament. And there, the single-elimination format simulates what you're going to face in the NCAA."

Lavin is a big proponent of the format even though his team had the biggest loss at the Garden this week -- forward D.J. Kennedy, out for the season with a knee injury early in the quarterfinal. The coach didn't recant his philosophy: "It gives the teams in the lower half of the league a reason to keep coming to practice with a purpose. It keeps hope alive."

And it gives every player the wonderful opportunity to play in games he never will forget.

There is a lesson for the Suffolk high school coach who didn't dress his starters in the relatively meaningless overall county championship, resting them for the state tournament. That kind of thing never, ever happens in the Big East. Players and coaches have too much respect for each other and their sport to give anything less than their all.

Maybe it costs them in The Big Dance (only three Big East Tournament champions have gone on to win the NCAA title the same year). So be it. Let the bracket sheets take care of themselves next week. This week was all about the basketball.