The Palumbo Center had given up just about every square inch of its available space to a throbbing crowd virtually enchanted by the idea of an old time -- old, old, old time -- Pitt-Duquesne hoop-off, and by the time eight minutes of it had elapsed, most every eyewitness had essentially the same urgent thought:

"Hey, I've got shopping to do!"

Pitt scored the game's first 14 points, 23 of its first 29, and suddenly everyone remembered that Duquesne probably wasn't picked to finish 11th in the Atlantic 10 for nothin', which only sounds like a joke because the Atlantic 10 has 14 teams, which actually is a joke.

For the biggest game on their schedule in terms of near-universal local interest, the Dukes took the precaution of missing their first 13 shots from 3-point range. You could take 13 random people out of the seats at various intervals and they wouldn't miss every single 3-pointer, would they?

But just when you began to wonder if Pitt athletes are well-versed in the Heimlich maneuver -- I mean this was the second conspicuous choking victim they'd encountered in five days -- Duquesne produced a manic 90-minute burst of reasonably accomplished basketball that turned a rout into desperate little drama.

Pitt wound up blowing 16/17ths of a 17-point lead and Duquesne hung around until Sam Young's 3-pointer from the right corner erected the four-point lead that proved insurmountable with 1:38 to play, but the really relevant hidden records this morning are these:

57-0.

1-0.

The first is DeJuan Blair's record against City League teams as a megaforce at Schenley High School. The second is his updated record in what gets called The City Game.

So DeJuan, are you just never going to lose to a Pittsburgh team?

"Naw," Blair said after scoring 10 points and raking a team-high nine rebounds (a game-high five off the offensive glass). "They did a good job, but we won; we outplayed them."

True on the data, but this seventh consecutive Pitt victory in the series featured long stretches in which the Panthers couldn't get out of their own way on offense, and the Dukes put together a 16-4 run in the first half that raised the question of whether shot blocking sensation Shawn James would actually be able to solve this long unbalanced basketball equation.

James, the celebrated transfer from Northeastern, had 20 points, 9 rebounds and 5 blocks before fouling out with 21 seconds left.

It was just the second loss in eight games for the Dukes, who were off to their best start since about Vietnam, but a brutal early road schedule might have taken some spring from their usual verticality. Ron Everhart's team got to the gym last night having traveled more than 3,200 miles to road games already, or at least 3,197.85 miles more than the Panthers, who dawned their road uniforms for the first time at about dinner time.

"Ain't no road game to me," Blair said. "I played a lot of high school games here, and the atmosphere tonight was just great. I just loved it. Everyone was all hyped up, and I made a couple of big plays tonight."

Biggest among them came in a second half in which Duquesne would whittle the lead to one point four times. With the Panthers up by seven and just less than 11 minutes remaining, Blair threw his 265 pounds on the floor at midcourt to wrestle a loose ball from 6-10 Duquesne grad student Kieron Achara, then flipped a pass from his back to Mike Cook in transition. Keith Benjamin eventually scored on that possession to make it 55-46.

Jamie Dixon had to be almost as pleased with his freshman strongman at that point as Blair was with himself.

"I made a couple of hustle plays," Blair said. "I did an excellent job executing on defense."

Pitt went to 8-0 for the young season and 54-3 in non-conference appointments under Dixon but got itself harassed pretty thoroughly by a Duquesne team that had been beating teams by larger average margins than the Panthers (31 points to 30.3). Dixon lost his cool and got whistled for a technical as the Dukes hurried back into it, and the usually unflappable Levance Fields got called for a five-second violation near the same juncture.

By player interpretation, Duquesne's fiery comeback was as much a case of sudden Pitt disinterest as talent.

"It wasn't going like as good a game as we thought it would be," Young said of that enormous Pitt lead at the outset. "When you're up by that much, you start to give a lot of leeway."

Is that what that was?

Looked suspiciously like a pretty good basketball game to me, or at least, you know, nobody got any shopping done.