John Harrar didn’t have to come back to Penn State. He had offers to go elsewhere in the wake of Pat Chambers’ resignation and the subsequent hiring of Micah Shrewsberry. He could have followed former roommate Jamari Wheeler to Ohio State. He could have settled down at plenty of other places looking for a fearless big man to crash the boards. He could have done a lot of things.
But he came back to Penn State.
And by doing so Harrar signed up for his fait accompli, a story that was almost certainly written before it ever began. Harrar came back to Penn State to make the NCAA Tournament, trying to drag the program just a few more yards over the finish line COVID-19 had taken from it two seasons ago.
But Harrar knew what everyone else knew: this group of Nittany Lions was slapped together, an island of other people’s misfit toys and players hopeful to make an impact on a bigger stage. They were older, but they were new. As for the returning names, Dallion Johnson was unproven, Seth Lundy and Myles Dread both prone to streaky play. Even Harrar – a battering ram of a man – but his game was never going to be enough on its own. He was going to need help.
In Harrar’s defense the Nittany Lions did just about everything you could have asked of them in 2021-22. They fought – they sure did fight – and they nearly won a few extra games simply on that merit alone. It’s easy to look back at the missed opportunities and wonder what might have been had a few shots fallen here or there. A very different season was at their fingertips. At the same time everyone has a good season if the losses are simply turned into wins.
They sure did fight though. 16 points from Jalen Pickett, 15 points from John Harrar to go with 12 rebounds to spearhead the Nittany Lions’ effort on Friday night in the Big Ten quarterfinals.
That fight made Penn State’s eventual 69-61 loss to Purdue on Friday night the perfect cap to a season that had seen so many ups and downs with a ton of guts gluing it all together.
Because Penn State opened up like it was playing with house money, working out to a 12-2 lead and generally holding to Boilermakers at an arm’s length for most of the first half. By the time Purdue finally knocked off the rust of sitting out the first two rounds of the Big Ten Tournament, the Boilermakers had pushed ahead for a 35-31 halftime margin behind a white-hot shooting streak of making nine of their last 10 shots in the half.
The second half opened with more Purdue offense and the Boilermakers flew ahead to take a nine point lead with less than five minutes gone by. That lead ballooned to 12 with 8:15 remaining in regulation.
And then it happened. Penn State activated its season-long fight or flight mechanism. It has never really made much sense, a team that has shot poorly for long stretches of the year suddenly turning into the sort of team it could theoretically become. Make after make, stop after stop, Penn State chipped away until it was a one-point game with 2:39 to go. A third-straight game in as many nights of comeback efforts. Down but not out, bleeding but still standing.
The hard part about comebacks: it takes so much going your way to pull them off, and after getting to within a point Penn State wouldn’t score again. Free throws and a beautiful one-man fast break by Jaden Ivey did the rest for Purdue as the Boilermakers advanced to the Big Ten Tournament semifinals.
And so John Harrar walked off the court one last time. It was fitting in a way, that his effort on Friday was reflective of so much of the work he had put in during his career. It was so much, and yet just not quite enough. If Penn State had been blown out on Friday night nobody would have blamed a team playing its third game in as many days. But nearly winning in spite of everything, and falling just short, it was fitting.
It’s easy to feel romantic about guys like Harrar who sign up for a probable suicide mission. Harrar went into this season knowing that Friday night would probably come one day, that he would try and maybe come up just a bit short. He did it with years of the same feeling under his belt and a ticket to something nicer in his pocket.
But he signed up for another run at the impossible. And boy did he give the impossible all it could handle.
