Eric Bledsoe grabbed a stool far away from the commotion going on in the locker room Thursday. After battling Cornell — and the blaring crowd it brought with it — the Kentucky point guard needed a minute to finally hear himself think.

‘They had their crowd and even some of West Virginia and Syracuse’s, too,’ Bledsoe said. ‘So we knew we had to find a way to ignore it and play our game in order to come out with a victory.’

With 22,271 looking on, Bledsoe and his Kentucky squad did just that. After 40 minutes of action, the top-seeded Wildcats (35-2) silenced a once-deafening crowd with a 62-45 victory over No. 12-seeded Cornell (29-5) in the second game of the East Regional semifinals at the Carrier Dome Thursday.

The Wildcats will play West Virginia (30-6) in the East Regional final Saturday.

Just 53 miles from its campus in Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell fans came out in droves. Thousands sported T-shirts that celebrated Cornell’s trip to the Sweet 16 — the first Ivy League team to do so since 1979. Suddenly, the Carrier Dome had turned into a giant sea of Big Red.

Cornell wasted little time capitalizing on the home-court advantage. Feeding off the crowd, Cornell jumped out to an early 10-2 lead through the first 4:44. With every made basket, the crowd erupted into a deafening pitch.

‘That’s how the crowd is,’ UK center DeMarcus Cousins said, ‘especially when it was more Cornell fans here tonight than Kentucky fans. When they made a run, we knew it was going to be loud.’

But after drilling four of its first seven shots from the field, Cornell suddenly went cold. And the Wildcats pounced. After a 3-pointer by Kentucky forward Patrick Patterson gave Kentucky a 14-10 lead with 11:52 to play in the half, he let out a loud ‘Let’s go!’ in the direction of teammate John Wall, who had assisted on the play. With that, the momentum started to swing. And it swung fast.

What had started with a Cousins layup with 14:54 to play in the first half ended up igniting a 30-6 run through the remainder of the half.

The Big Red attempted just 10 shots during that stretch, connecting on only three. To make matters worse, the team made it to the free-throw line just two times in the half. With each miss, the crowd quieted a little bit, and UK capitalized in transition.

‘Before the game, our focus was to stop them on the defensive end,’ Patterson said. ‘That was our main focus, to play our best defense and let that lead to baskets out on the break.’

For the first time in the NCAA Tournament, Cornell couldn’t rely on its offense. The ball-screen, motion offense — which was a well-oiled machine through the first two games of the Tournament — was suddenly halted by the bigger, faster group of Wildcats.

‘Sometimes you just have games like that, where they don’t go down,’ Cornell forward Ryan Wittman said. ‘But they’ve got a lot of length on defense, obviously, something we had to get a little adjusted to. I don’t think Temple and Wisconsin had the length on the perimeter that they do.’

The second half provided little relief for the Big Red mass in the bleachers. Led by Bledsoe, Patterson, Cousins and Wall, Kentucky displayed its athleticism with dunk after dunk in transition. Cornell had no match physically for the Wildcats.

Despite a few second-half runs — once again igniting the crowd — Cornell was never able to recover from the early deficit. And after a while, the novelty idea of Cornell possibly advancing to the Elite Eight wore off.

With Cornell desperately putting Kentucky on the foul line to extend the game, Bledsoe iced eight consecutive free throws in the final 1:17 to seal the victory.

And with that, the red sea parted. After 39 minutes of hope, it was finally over.

‘We knew it was going to quiet them down,’ Bledsoe said. ‘Crowds always do that when we start getting leads, and they calmed down a lot.’

aljohn@syr.edu

Published on March 25, 2010 at 12:00 pm