You can blame young Ashton Gibbs' unscheduled vanishing act, and you can be pretty certain that Pitt coach Jamie Dixon will be able to identify and write prescriptions for at least a dozen potential long-range calamities as the winter grinds forward, but nothing that happened inside The Pete last night against a brilliantly antagonistic Georgetown team should diminish the Panthers in any way.

Sure it's painfully evident that Gibbs, the super slick sophomore who is supposed to pull Pitt out of any fire with his ready flash and his touch from distance, went 2 for 8 from behind the 3-point line, missing twice from the same spot with about 100 seconds to play. Either swish would have dragged the Panthers to within a highly manageable three points of the Hoyas.

A lot more foreboding from Pitt's perspective was a second-consecutive performance in which it was unable to trump superior defense with its own patented version of that very thing. On a night when two consistently excellent basketball programs built on the grittiest elements of Eastern Seaboard defense collided at speed, Georgetown played it better in the most critical stretches.

Let's not complicate it.

"There are so many different teams you can say this about in this conference," Hoyas boss John Thompson III was saying after watching his guys hold on for a 74-66 victory, the first for a visiting team in Oakland in 32 shows. "The players are too good, the coaches are too good; they'll figure out your plans every time. You just have to hope the stars align.

"There are a whole lot of great teams in this league and no one's going away. That's Big East basketball every night. You're going against the best players, the best coaches, the best fans in the country every night. There's no rest."

All of that frames the general climate for Pitt's 5-0 start in the conference, explains the intense excitement that glommed onto these Panthers, and no 40-minute period in which the stars temporarily realigned ought to change anyone's opinion of Pitt.

It happened that Georgetown's stars aligned behind junior guard Chris Wright, who poured in 27 points and established an unwavering rhythm in which no Hoyas guard missed a 3. Wright, Austin Freeman and Jason Clark went 7 for 7, while Pitt's guards were clanking 3 for 16.

In just about any game just about anywhere, that kind of long distance imbalance will have a similar result, but the typical litany of Big East subplots made this a far-more-florid mid-January drama. It wasn't just that Georgetown had rumbled back from 15 points down to Villanova on the road last weekend, only to lose by five, and it wasn't just that Pitt had done something even more improbable, pulling itself by the fingernails out of a five-point deficit in the final 54 seconds against Louisville, then winning in overtime.

Those were the favorable karmas the Panthers and Hoyas brought to the floor, and Georgetown's didn't transform into the dominant feng-shui purely by accident.

"We just came out very aggressive in the second half," said Wright, who had 15 after the intermission. "We feel like we're a great second-half team and we've proven that. We were just trying to be attentive to what was going on and take what the defense was giving us."

And Pitt's defense startled the sold-out campus hot house by giving generously in those critical early minutes that turned a 31-31 halftime tie into more Georgetown momentum than could ultimately be overcome.

The Hoyas got field goals on its first six trips upcourt in the second half, four of them on layups that might have indicated Pitt had no knowledge of the principles of the Princeton offense adapted for the big stage by Thompson, the noted Ivy alum.

"No," said Pitt's Gilbert Brown, "it wasn't that. We knew the plays. There was just some miscommunication on our part."

Really.

Where have I heard that before other than in the Steelers' secondary?

The Hoyas, on the other hand, had no trouble applying the defensive heat when they had to, like after Pitt hopped back to leapfrog to a 56-54 lead on Jermaine Dixon's 3 from the right corner with 7:48 left. Pitt got exactly two field goals on its next 12 possessions.

Gibbs finally hit a 3 with 31 seconds left, nudging his line to eight points on the night, or 9.5 below his average.

"Ashton had open 3s he'd normally knock down," said Jermaine Dixon, who knocked down only one of four himself. "But it wasn't that. Defensively, we just weren't there tonight."

You don't have to be absent on defense for one night to lose in this league. You can do it being absent for five minutes. This is very some very tough business, and as JT III rightly said, no one is going away.

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