Xavier Tries to Heal a Self-Inflicted Wound GREENSBORO, N.C. - Xavier Coach Chris Mack is fond of telling his team that the games everybody remembers most are the ones played in March. That may be true, but it's going to take quite a run in the N.C.A.A. tournament to make people forget about the game that has already defined the Musketeers this season. Maybe nothing can erase the image of that December madness - Xavier's bench-clearing brawl against its crosstown rival Cincinnati - and the disappointment that followed. But Xavier will try, beginning Friday night when the Musketeers (21-12) open against No. 7 Notre Dame (22-11) in a South Region game at Greensboro Coliseum. Although a No. 10 seeding is most likely below what fans thought the Musketeers were capable of early in the season, it is at least a last chance at redemption for a team that fell far short of expectations after that fight. "Xavier basketball is much bigger than 10 bad minutes on a Saturday," Mack said Thursday. This program's done so much good for so many years. We can define ourselves with who we truly are. Or were. Xavier opened the season ranked No. 14 and won its first eight games. The Musketeers didn't do it the easy way, either; they beat top opponents Vanderbilt and Purdue in that run and climbed as high as No. That was where the Musketeers stood on Dec. 10 when they played Cincinnati in the annual Skyline Chili Crosstown Shootout at the Cintas Center. With Xavier ahead by 76-53 and seconds from wrapping up another quality win, there was a confrontation among players on the court. A shove started a brawl. Players from both benches joined the fight and, in the most memorable and damaging of the punches thrown, Cincinnati's Yancy Gates decked Xavier's Kenny Frease with a shot to the left eye, drawing blood. Xavier senior Tu Hollaway managed to add to the ugliness with a glaring lack of remorse in his postgame comments. "We got a whole bunch of gangstas in our locker room," he said at the time. Not thugs, but tough guys on the court. We went out there and zipped "em up at the end of the game. That's our motto - zip "em up." Four players were suspended by each team for their roles in the fight, including Hollaway, Xavier's top scorer, who was suspended one game for his "gangstas" comment. The season was still young enough for Xavier to overcome the brawl's aftereffects. Instead, the Musketeers buckled. Xavier lost five of six, then meandered through much of the Atlantic 10 season to finish with a 19-11 record. "After that game, our confidence was lost a little bit, so it took a couple months to get it back," Holloway said. Once you lose games a little bit, you start to look around like, you know what, maybe we're not as good as we thought we were. So it takes things to get it back. It took until March for Xavier to regain its confidence. But the Musketeers found it in Atlantic City during the Atlantic 10 tournament. Xavier edged Dayton in the first game and then beat Saint Louis to advance to the final. Although the Musketeers lost to St. Bonaventure in the final, the run was enough to get them into the N.C.A.A. field. "My Athlon magazine kind of had them as a sexy Final Four pick," Notre Dame Coach Mike Brey said. So we know the firepower. I know they were in a little bit of a lull after the incident. Watching them lately in the A-10 tournament, I think they're reborn and we're preparing to play the team I saw beat Vanderbilt, come back and beat Purdue. I think that's who we have to prepare for. If Xavier plays the way it did at the start of the season, this could turn out to be a season worth remembering after all. "I feel like this team has grown closer together," Mack said. I don't know if there's another team in college basketball that's gone through what we've gone through, some may say self-inflicted, but nevertheless we've gone through it and I think we're a much closer group in March than we were in January. And again, that's when you want to be playing your best basketball.