SYRACUSE, N.Y. – This one will go down in the books as a seven-point loss, but we should call it what it was – a whipping. It’s been a while since that word has been used to describe a Georgetown loss, but a belt-thrashing is exactly what transpired Saturday afternoon inside a rowdy Carrier Dome. Syracuse – a hungry, mean team fighting for its postseason life – took the eighth-ranked Hoyas by the ear, led them straight to their room without supper, and then tanned their hide. Unfortunately for John Thompson III and his team, their embarrassment came before the largest crowd of the 2008 college basketball season – a gathering of 31,000 plus reeling and rollicking in sheer Orange ecstasy.

This is what happens when you turn the ball over 12 times in the first 20 minutes. When you shoot 30 percent from the field and your leading scorer has five points at halftime. When you allow an unruly crowd to crawl under your skin and unravel you from inside. You fall. And bloody your nose on the way down.

“This team doesn’t have the hardness that is necessary to win against a good team on the road,” Thompson said afterward, the most honest assessment of his team so far this season. “There’s still time left to get that, but we haven’t gotten it yet.”

Unlike previous road losses at Memphis, Pittsburgh and Louisville, Georgetown wasn’t frazzled by a full-court press or plagued by poor shooting. Syracuse simply sat back in a soft zone and let the Hoyas do it to themselves.

“Our defense was key tonight,” Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said. “Our defense was tremendous. Our guys hung in there.”

The nation’s eighth-ranked team faltered, then panicked, and before long it was too late.

“Everybody wanted to do something to try change the way things were going, but everyone was trying to make the extra play or the extra pass,” DaJuan Summers said of his team’s early free fall. “But we just weren’t on the same page.”

The Hoyas – namely Jon Wallace, who scored a career-high 26 points – deserve some credit for not lying down in the second half. The atmosphere at halftime was beyond bleak – when Thompson gathered his troops in the locker room midway through, Georgetown was close to being massacred. They were down 16, having given Syracuse 18 points off turnovers and been outscored 16-2 in the paint. The Orange had led by as much as 21, and the home crowd had the scent of blood in their nostrils. Outside, the snow drifts were piling up, the sky as blank and colorless as the ground below. The scene resembled something out of Fargo, and Georgetown was Steve Buscemi, halfway inside the wood chipper.

Led by a three-point barrage from Wallace, the Hoyas reined themselves in, cut down on the turnovers, and twice sliced the lead to single digits.

“We came out and scrapped and clawed and got back into it in the second half, but they were able to hold on,” Thompson said. “It’s good to see us regroup and bounce back. It was good to see us put together one good half. But we shouldn’t have been in that position.”

It was odd to see the Hoyas – who lost at Louisville last Saturday and were granted a gimme against Villanova Monday night – play so poorly against an inferior team. Last year’s team distanced themselves from the rest of the Big East pack in the month of February, but this season’s squad has seen their stranglehold on first place slipping loose.

“We came out uncharacteristic of ourselves and were careless with the basketball,” said Wallace, who finished an astounding 9-of-10 from the field and 6-of-7 from the beyond the arc. “The way we started, we weren’t as hard or as tough as we need to be on the road. We just need to get that toughness that coach talks about. We need to attack first.”

The Hoyas have plenty of time to straighten themselves out before the Big East tournament. A trip to Providence looms on Monday, but it’s another chance to prove that they can win on the road.

“We just have to get better on the road,” Thompson said. “I don’t think it’s the crowd, I don’t think it’s us being “the hunted,” I don’t think it’s whatever. I just think we need to figure out how to do better.”

Wallace and Summers know that nothing’s wrong that can’t be fixed.

“I don’t think toughness is the term we should use, because I don’t think this team is soft or weak so to speak,” Summers said. “We just need to be disciplined. We just need to stick together – that’s discipline. We can’t just fall apart when things get tough.”

Said Wallace, standing beside his teammate: “This is something we can control.”

Call it toughness, hardness, discipline or whatever it looks like to you. Saturday was a good old-fashioned beat down, despite the final score.

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