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Cloudy skies with late-night snow showers. Low 34F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of snow 60%..

Cloudy skies with late-night snow showers. Low 34F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of snow 60%.

St. Bonaventure’s Dominick Welch (1) takes a jumper over Xavier’s Zack Freemantle (32). Bona’s season ended Tuesday evening at the hands of the Muskateers, who eliminated the Bonnies in the semifinals of the National Invitation Tournament.

St. Bonaventure’s Kyle Lofton (0) drives up the court during Tuesday’s NIT semifinal at Madison Square Garden.

St. Bonaventure’s Dominick Welch (1) takes a jumper over Xavier’s Zack Freemantle (32). Bona’s season ended Tuesday evening at the hands of the Muskateers, who eliminated the Bonnies in the semifinals of the National Invitation Tournament.

St. Bonaventure’s Kyle Lofton (0) drives up the court during Tuesday’s NIT semifinal at Madison Square Garden.

And that’s the way St. Bonaventure’s bizarre basketball season ended … with a severe case of “too little, too late.”

This team that endured an undulating campaign complete with an impressive in-season tournament sweep, a 25-day hiatus, a rejuvenating seven-game win streak, a heartbreaking one-point loss in the Atlantic 10 quarterfinals, and a fatiguing, but rewarding three-game road run against Power 5 opponents to the National Invitation Tournament semifinals, saw their season end Tuesday night in what might be the last-ever NIT Final Four at Madison Square Garden.

The Bonnies (23-10) will be playing some serious “what if” in assessing their 84-77 loss to Xavier in basketball’s mecca last night.

This game was lost in the first half when Xavier stormed to a 19-point lead five minutes before intermission.

And Bona, which after midseason slipped to 12-7, but had made a habit of second-half rallies, this time dug too big a hole.

Favored by a point-and-a-half, and seeded third in the Final Four, the Bonnies made their charge in the second half, cutting the Musketeers’ lead to 65-60 with 5½ minutes to play. But it got no closer to the disappointment of eight busloads of SBU students and seemingly every alum who lives in the metro New York/North Jersey region.

AND AS soon as the final buzzer sounded, those fans’ attention immediately turned to what happens next for St. Bonaventure’s program.

They had already sweated out several days of worrying that coach Mark Schmidt would head 400 miles east to Amherst and take the job at A-10 rival UMass.

It might have been hard to turn down an $800,000 raise, a gap which reportedly SBU subsequently narrowed, but asking him to immediately leave his team on the brink of the NIT semifinals was too big an ask.

Clearly, Schmidt’s return is vital.

He passed Larry Weise (202) in career victories at Bona (268), and in his 15 seasons has taken the team to three NCAA tournaments plus two NITs and twice was the Atlantic 10’s Coach of the Year while producing five 20-win seasons.

And what has made him so valuable at a small, rural Catholic school is that he’s an exceptional bench coach. Oh, his teams have lost when they shot poorly, played lousy (Xavier in the first half, for instance), or were overmatched. But you’d be hard-pressed to recall a time during Schmidt’s tenure when the Bonnies were beaten by a coaching gaffe.

HOWEVER, next season he’s looking at a seemingly major rebuild.

Technically, his five senior starters could return due to the coronavirus-allowed extra year of eligibility. However, there’s no indication that even one of them will come back, let alone all.

And those five put up some extraordinary numbers, starting with all of them already exceeding 1,000 career points.

Point guard Kyle Lofton, if his career is over, scored 1,610, 14th on Bona’s all-time list. Dominick Welch had 1,198 (32nd), Osun Osunniyi, the school’s all-time shot-blocker, 1,100 (39th) and Jaren Holmes 1,020 (46th). Jalen Adaway, the fifth starter, has 1,252, but he played two seasons at Miami (O.H.) and scored only 746 of them as a Bonnie.

But was another stat that jumped off their collective page.

Lofton, Holmes, Welch and Adaway each averaged 38 minutes a game for the season, Osunniyi had a 31-minute average.

And while, when Bona had that struggling stretch, Schmidt caught some social media flak for not giving his starters more rest, he kept to his plan, maintained it wasn’t too much and made it work.

But it’s likely he also had a very good reason for his bench seeing a mere 17 minutes action per game on average. And at that, two redshirts, freshman Quadry Adams and sophomore Abdoul Karim Coulibaly, saw most of that time.

Another redshirt, sophomore Linton Brown, played only 10 games before being sidelined by health issues.

However, four freshmen, Joryam Saizonou, Oluwasegun Durosinmi, Justin Ndjock-Tadjore and Pedro Rossi saw limited action while two others, Brett Rumpel and Anouar Mellouk, were redshirted this season.

That doesn’t say any of them can’t play at the A-10 level, we just don’t know, as Schmidt was disinclined to use inexperienced players in a season when 15 Bona games were decided by nine points or less.

And there’s one other factor, too.

Young college players aren’t known for their patience in this transfer-portal era, some of those listed above could possibly take that route.

Of course, it works both ways, as Adaway’s transfer to Bona proved.

In any case, this looms as a fascinating offseason for Schmidt, his staff and the Bonnie fan base.

(Chuck Pollock, an Olean Times Herald senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@oleantimesherald.com)

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