UPDATED: Jan. 7, 2018 at 1:41 a.m.

Tyus Battle pounded one dribble to his left and stepped into what would have been the game-winning 3-pointer for Syracuse, another last-second heroic highlight for himself and the final explosion for the crowd of nearly 25,000 straining their screams, willing the Carrier Dome to its loudest volume this season.

His team had surrendered the lead it held almost the entire game, and Battle had seemingly done everything needed to erase those mistakes. He tied the game with a triple over Notre Dame’s best perimeter defender with less than a minute remaining. He got the team’s next defensive stop by securing the ball poked away from a Fighting Irish big man. Then, as Syracuse’s four other players cleared out as usual for the comeback’s last and most crucial step, Battle fumbled the ball away gathering it for the 3.

“I got too deep,” Battle said. “Lost the ball.”

Notre Dame flipped a pass ahead, trying for a quick score. Battle missed a chase-down block, but his teammate Oshae Brissett got there instead. Yet the ball fell into the hands of the same defender Battle had sunk his game-tying 3 over, Rex Pflueger. Battle watched, frozen underneath the stanchion, as Pflueger flipped in a layup sealing Notre Dame’s (13-3, 3-0 Atlantic Coast) escape from Syracuse (12-4, 1-2), 51-49, on Saturday afternoon in the Carrier Dome. The Orange lost back-to-back games for the first time this season because of an ineffective offense that generated Syracuse’s fewest points since it scored 47 in a March 2015 loss to Virginia.

Standing at the podium for his postgame press conference, Boeheim surveyed the statistics sheet laid out in front of him. When asked if it concerned him the Orange couldn’t beat the Fighting Irish without its two best players, point guard Matt Farrell and center Bonzie Colson, both out with injury, he squinted his eyes and shook his head.

“I don’t care who they have,” he said. “Our offense is the problem. We held them to 30 percent field goal shooting, 30.3 percent from the 3-point line. We can’t score. You can’t score 50 points at home (and win).

“We got a problem.”

Though Battle assigned himself the blame for not converting Syracuse’s last opportunity, teammates and Boeheim acknowledged it was a situation the Orange shouldn’t have found themselves in anyway.

Syracuse struggled to score inside (18 points in the paint) and in transition (seven), even though Brissett said Notre Dame sent “everyone” to the glass on both ends, but the Orange supplanted that production with its best performance from beyond the arc this season, shooting 8-for-18 (44 percent). That shooting, paired with SU’s defense, overcame Notre Dame’s overwhelming advantage on the glass. SU held a 28-19 advantage at halftime, the Fighting Irish’s lowest point-total in a half this season.

The nine-point advantage seemed enough for a hot-shooting Orange team, but then the misses came. Still, Syracuse ground Notre Dame into playing a game that a defensive-minded team like SU wants to play.

“We’re going to be in (physical, low-scoring) games,” Boeheim said, “we just cannot score. It’s been a struggle, and it’s probably going to continue to be a struggle unless we can score points. … They scored 51 points. It’s not our defense. Our defense would’ve won any game. We have to be able to score points.”

After the game, as Battle talked while staring at the floor, he was asked how the offense could possibly improve.

“Uhm,” he said and paused for three seconds. “It’s just progression. It’s going to take some time. That’s really it.”

In Syracuse’s last gasp, after Pflueger hit the shot to give Notre Dame the lead, Battle put his hands on his head before realizing that, with 2.6 seconds, Boeheim wasn’t going to take a timeout. He burst back onto the court, but by then Brissett had already in-bounded to Howard. The point guard, the team’s most effective option from beyond the arc at the moment, pulled up just before the mid-line for nearly the same heave he had needed to make three days earlier. It was the logical end point for a Syracuse offense that has struggled all season to generate quality looks on the other side of half-court. Howard released.

This, too, fell short.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, the game in which Syracuse scored its fewest points prior to its loss to Notre Dame on Saturday was misstated. Syracuse scored 47 points against Virginia in March 2015. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on January 6, 2018 at 7:59 pm

Contact Sam: sjfortie@syr.edu | @Sam4TR