Pitt peaking just in time for fourth season

NEW YORK – They call it the four seasons.

Not anything like the luxury resort chain or even… NEW YORK – They call it the four seasons.

Not anything like the luxury resort chain or even the doo-wop group of the ’60s. It’s the way the Pitt basketball team divides its five-month haul between November and, if all goes according to plan, early April.

You’ve heard of a tale of two seasons before, when a team resurrects itself with a resurgent second half of the year after a trainwreck of a first, or, more disappointingly, vice versa. But a tale of four seasons? This is a new one.

The first season is the nonconference schedule – a relative spring training, so to speak, to grease the gears and find a mesh before things start to heat up during the second season, the Big East regular season.

The third season, then, is the Big East tournament, which Pitt wrestled from the hands of Georgetown at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.

“We take every step of the season differently,” Ronald Ramon said after Pitt upset No. 2-seeded Louisville in the quarterfinals on Thursday. “We separate it. This is one of the events that we try to get focused for and come out and play the best basketball we can play.”

It doesn’t get much better than a Big East championship. At the conclusion of the third season, a perfect third season, no less, the Panthers are playing like they’re already deep into the fourth – the NCAA Tournament. After winning four games in four days to capture Pitt’s first Big East title since 2003, there isn’t much more the Panthers can do that they didn’t accomplish in the Garden – except shoot a little better from the free-throw line.

Levance Fields is finally looking like the guy that hit the game-winning 3-pointer against Duke in the very building he scored 10 and 13 points, respectively, with six assists in each of Pitt’s first two tournament games last week, before throwing another 10 and six at Georgetown on Saturday.

Sam Young’s knees are as springy as ever, evidenced by his 80 points in Pitt’s four tournament games – one point shy of Ben Gordon’s tournament record. If that doesn’t raise your brow, then his jaw-dropping, eye-popping stuff of 7-foot-2-inch Roy Hibbert on Saturday should.

“I can’t say enough about how Sam has played,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said.

Center DeJuan Blair is back to banging on the block, and he battled Hibbert.