ATLANTA — James Southerland gave a sheepish smile. Now that he was here — in Atlanta, at the Final Four, as a senior — he could admit that he expected a free ride to this exact setting earlier in his career. Once for sure, and twice was not out of the question.

“My freshman year I was like, ‘This is the easy ride to the Final Four just sitting on the bench and going all the way,’” Southerland said with a laugh. “But it didn’t turn out like that.”

Southerland has been a part of four NCAA Tournament teams in his career at Syracuse, two of which were No. 1 seeds, one of which was bounced early and a fourth that actually made the Final Four. Southerland was surprised that this group — a team that earned a No. 4 seed — was the one to reach the national semifinals, just as Jim Boeheim was.

Boeheim said Thursday that he felt the 2010 team featuring Wesley Johnson and last year’s team featuring Dion Waiters were ones he “expected” to reach the Final Four. But the loss of a key player in each season — first Arinze Onuaku suffered a knee injury and then Fab Melo was declared ineligible — rewrote those premonitions.

“I would have expected it more if one of those teams had gone,” Boeheim said Thursday. “But this team’s a good team. They’re a good basketball team. They’re playing good basketball.”

Unlike Southerland, C.J. Fair said he always expected this team to make the Final Four. He looked at the landscape of college basketball and saw the lack of a dominant team. There was no Kentucky, which rolled through the Tournament last year behind Anthony Davis and a slew of other first-round draft picks.

“I knew coming into this year that we could make a Final Four appearance,” Fair said. “We had the pieces to our team, and college basketball was kind of even this year as far as talent-wise.”

This team had the pieces, evidenced by its run through the East Regional, but it took longer to jell. There was no No. 1 seed, no spot atop the regular season rankings at any point in time.

For that reason, Southerland said, this year feels different. Syracuse is without a target on its back, and instead it’s going after the teams that do.

Three years after he thought he had a golden ticket, Southerland made it to the Final Four. And it was well worth the wait.

“It’s great to be here,” Southerland said. “It’s definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me, but also we know that we have a job to do. We want to go out and win a championship. And we’re not settling for anything less.”

Published on April 5, 2013 at 5:32 pm

Contact Michael: mjcohe02@syr.edu | @Michael_Cohen13