Joe Mihalich Quotations

When you run that baseline when it's a dead ball, you give a team life.

Our goals are the same. Nothing has changed at all. There's no panic here, no sense of any of that stuff. We're close, so doggone close you can still feel it. We've been a one-play-here, one-play-there kind of team so far. That's why we don't sleep a lot at night.

That whole team is on a mission. They have the senior leadership and they can win this.

We're all kind of in a state of shock right now. It's times like this that really test your faith. For some reason, we weren't supposed to win that game.

You get sad at this time of year. Now, I can't wait until Oct. 15 because this is all you work for. I can't believe it's over.

As good as (Jordan) was, our team was fortunate to pull it together and be better than Marist. It's not a game for individuals. It's a game for teams, and our team, today, was better than them.

It's just simple execution. Cut hard, screen hard and pass good. It's not something we've never worked on before.

It's a good feeling to be at home and it's a good feeling to get a win. Four to six weeks ago, we probably wouldn't have won this game, but we're coming together as a team. It was better for us to battle back and win this game than to win by 12 to 15 points.

It's not often somebody scores 36 points and you say you did a good defensive job on him. Lorenzo locked him up and Clif Brown did a good job, too.

It's our ball and anything but that. It was a combination of execution. One guy not coming hard enough to the ball and another guy not putting enough zip on the pass or reading that he wasn't open.

It's caused them to focus more in a lot of ways.

It was a great win for us. We beat a hot team which has become one of the best teams in the league. These guys are starting to believe in themselves. All the things we talked about four, five, six weeks ago they had to prove we could do them. We're starting to prove we can do them.

It will be tough. One of Fairfield's strengths is their depth. They have 10 or 11 guys, and if you even count our managers we have only nine.

They can certainly win the league. A lot of teams can win it, but Iona and Marist are running one and two.

That's a real good team. They can score. You can't cheat on anybody. They've got a lot of different weapons.

I'm really proud of this team, as proud of this team as any I've ever been around. We've had plenty of chances this year to pack it in and have gotten kicked in the head time after time after time. These guys just refuse to give in.

I don't know if we're consciously trying to do that but we talk about valuing the basketball and the possessions are longer. We've made the possessions longer defensively, playing some zones, and offensively our possessions are longer, too. In years past we just let Alvin Cruz push it up there and try to find somebody quick.

Charron never lost confidence in himself. When the bright lights are on, he wants to be out there.

He's a man on a mission. I think that whole team is.

This is one you're just going to second-guess forever and ever and ever. It's hard to look at the positives but that's our job to do. We played the best team in the league . . . and we had them beat, played our hearts and guts out and just couldn't finish the job.