By Corey Johns
Senior Staff Writer

ALBANY, N.Y. — Darryl Proctor didn’t want his college career to end in Albany with a third-straight loss to Boston University in the first round of the America East Tournament.

The senior forward made sure his defending-champion — but now underdog — UMBC Retrievers would make it to round two, scoring a career-high 33 points and grabbing 11 rebounds to help the Retrievers force overtime and nab a win.

Both times UMBC played Boston University this year the Retrievers came out on the short end. But UMBC won when it counted, beating the Terriers 79-75 after Proctor’s late lay-up tied the game and forced overtime.

“The only thing going through my head was that game that went into overtime in Boston,” Darryl Proctor said. “It’s hard to beat a team three times, especially when it went into overtime so it was bound to happen and we already knew.”

Reggie Jackson may be know as Mr. October, but Proctor is certainly making a case to be called Mr. March. His stats speak for themselves. In tournament games the past two years Proctor is now 4-1 with the only loss being in the NCAA tournament to Georgetown. In these five games, Proctor has averaged 21.2 p.p.g., 8.2 r.p.g., 3.4 s.p.g., and has shot 54.8 percent from the field.

“He’s my player of the year,” said Jay Greene. “I’m just fortunate to have a guy like that on my team and he can put the team on his back when needed and he did that today for us.”

Though Greene was cold from the floor as his only two points of the night came from the foul line, he still had a solid game with eight rebounds and eight assists. Most importantly he only had two turnovers, which was one of the main reasons UMBC pulled the upset of the No. 3 seeded Terriers. Boston U turned the ball over 15 times while UMBC only did four times.

“I think all year we’ve done a tremendous job taking care of the basketball and a lot of that has to do with Jay,” said coach Randy Monroe. “We’re just fortunate to have a very good guard who has a nose for the ball, who understands the game, and who has a very high basketball IQ.”

The key to the win was the post game. Obviously Proctor played a big role in that, but Justin Fry also scored a career-high 19 points with 10 rebounds and played great defense to shut down their inside game.

“Justin Fry has been playing phenomenal basketball since our first game at Boston University, and particularly the second half and he’s just been playing well ever since,” Monroe said. “I know he’s missed about three weeks of action but he’s done a tremendous job just really coming back and giving us a spark.”

But Boston U had a lot of trouble in the paint to help out the UMBC players. At the end of regulation both Scott Brittain and freshman of the year Jake O’Brien fouled out while swingman Matt Wolff fouled out early in the overtime period to give UMBC a tremendous depth advantage, as well as advantage of talent in the paint.

“I didn’t think we were remotely aggressive enough in our four and five position the whole game,” said Boston coach Dennis Wolff. “This is a team we needed to try to put the ball inside a little against and not only weren’t we scoring or getting fouled but it became a liability.”

The entire second half was close, but UMBC never seemed to be able to get something going to put themselves ahead, but that was until UMBC outscored the Terriers 9-2 in the final two and a half minutes of regulation which ended with a game tying lay-up from Proctor with two seconds left that sent it into an extra period.

“It was either me or Jay going to take that shot and I had the ball in my hands so I took initiative and took the shot,” Proctor said.

With the eventual overtime victory UMBC advances to the semi-finals of the conference tournament for the third straight year. On Sunday at 2 p.m. the Retrievers will have a rematch against Albany, who upset Vermont- who was arguably the best team in the conference, in another overtime game.

“We just played Albany a week ago and it should be an exciting game.  I don’t see it being anything less than knockdown, drag out ally fight in the America East conference,” Monroe said. “It’s almost WWE Smackdown on Friday night.  You’re just going to see two teams playing hard.”