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No matter how good Merrimack might be, losing to a team transitioning to D-1 is bad, especially for a Power Five team.
So for former Duke star and assistant Chris Collins and his Northwestern team, after that loss, beating Providence was a big deal.
Collins said he told his team that you could either “lay down, or get off the pavement and fight.”
Clearly Northwestern chose to fight.
The Wildcats ran up a 20 point lead - and lost a big part of it - but still won.
It must come as a huge relief but Collins took a philosophical approach to the win: “We can’t overreact to tonight, just like we can’t overreact to what happened last Friday. It’s one game in a long, long journey, but it puts us back on the right track as we move forward into our next one.”
The next three should be wins. After that it’s Boston College then Purdue as things start to get real.