HALIFAX — There’s no making sense of how the Carleton Ravens got here.
Try, if you want. Try to figure out how the roster that lost three starters, including the best player in the country, made it to the U Sports final eight. Try to understand how the team that lost its most games this century made it to the national championship game.
And once you’ve made sense of that, try to understand how the Ravens took the St. Francis Xavier X-Men to double-overtime after trailing by 23 points in the game that decides it all.
Try to understand it, because the Carleton Ravens are somehow champions again. This time, it’s a 109-104, double-overtime win against St. Francis Xavier, delivering Carleton its fourth consecutive national championship and 17th in the last 20 seasons. There’s no making sense of that.
And this year, the Ravens did something they haven’t before. The women won alongside the men, defeating the Queen’s Gaels four hours away in Sydney, N.S. No Canadian university has accomplished that in 38 years.
Try your best to understand it. You can’t.
“Somehow, we believed we were gonna win tonight. I just had a belief,” Carleton head coach Taffe Charles said. “We found a way to get it done, which is unbelievable.”
It almost didn’t happen. Drowning in the noise of nearly 10,000 fans at the Scotiabank Centre, the Ravens trailed by 23 points with three minutes left in the second quarter. There was no breaking through the crushing weight of the home St. Francis Xavier crowd.
Until the Ravens did. With star guard Aiden Warnholtz on the bench to protect him from more fouls, Carleton’s supporting cast—Connor Vreeken, Elliot Bailey and Wazir Latiff—began to chip away. They outscored the X-Men 12-2 and Latiff ended the half with a three-point jump shot.
Down by 13 at the half, Carleton’s experience of championship after championship after championship kicked into gear.
“We’ve been here before,” the players told each other, according to Vreeken. “They haven’t. They’re gonna get tight. We gotta trust our fundamentals.”
Warnholtz came off the bench and the comeback kept going. Within four minutes, Carleton trailed only 49-46.
“We were dead to rights a whole bunch of times,” Charles said. “Just had enough experience to just kind of get through it. Just enough experience.”
Then there’s Warnholtz’s flailing, Hail Mary three-point jump shot with seconds left in the fourth quarter that tied the game. It was as impressive as it was unbelievable.
Even Warnholtz can’t make sense of that.
“It was a bit of a lucky one. I can’t lie,” he said.
Then came overtime, the first U Sports championship game to go to an extra frame since 2001 when, ironically, the X-Men won. Finally, there was double-overtime for the first time in the history of the gold medal game.
When Vreeken grabbed the rebound and the buzzer mercifully reached zero with the Ravens up by five, Charles raised his arms. Gebrael Samaha and Marjok Okado hugged each other mid-air. Warnholtz heaved the ball to the heavens.
The season the Ravens had just been through came to Charles’ mind.
It began in the summer, when the Ravens lost by the widest margin in program history to the University of Kentucky Wildcats. It continued into November, when the Queen’s Gaels beat the Ravens for the second time in eight months. And it culminated in mid-January, when Carleton lost back-to-back games for only the second time in the last 20 years.
Carleton’s four losses were its most since 1999-00. It doesn’t matter now.
“All season, people have been saying that we’re the worst team in the last century, we don’t have what it takes, we’re not gonna win,” Vreeken said. “Everyone wants us to lose. Everyone expects us to lose. But I knew that with my guys … that we were gonna come back and get this done. It just felt really good to kind of silence everyone.”
The Ravens are in the history books again, this time for their double championship. For Charles, who coached the Carleton women’s team to a national championship in 2018 before moving to the men’s side when now-director of basketball operations Dave Smart retired, it’s a vindicating moment for the program he helped build.
“My only regret is that we missed it [happening],” Charles said. “Man oh man, it’s gonna be a great celebration when we get back to Carleton.”
Featured image by L. Manuel Baechlin.
