VILLANOVA, Pa. -- I thought the Steelers' Hines Ward and Heath Miller had set an impossible standard for the weekend for playing hard, playing to exhaustion and playing to the bitter end. But the Pitt men's basketball team trumped it yesterday. Those kids were losers only on the final scoreboard.

You might have heard something about how Pitt came here short-handed and overmatched because of the serious injuries to senior swingman Mike Cook and junior point guard Levance Fields. It didn't just have to play Villanova -- the No. 17 team in America -- with a seven-man rotation. It had to do it in one of the Big East Conference's more difficult environments.

It would have been such a fabulous win.

"Our guys feel they should have won this game -- no matter how many players we have," Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said, the deafening roar from the home crowd after Villanova's 64-63 win still ringing in his aching ears.

"We still have the guys to get it done."

Dixon seemed more disappointed, more frustrated, maybe even angrier after this game than he has been after other losses, although the truth is he has been so successful that there really hasn't been much of a sampling to gauge. Maybe it was because he knows Pitt wasted a big chance to get a precious conference road win mostly because of 22 turnovers, some of which could be attributed to being without Fields -- the team's best player -- and others to fatigue from having to play with such a short bench. More likely, though, it was because he knows this game quite likely provided a damning glimpse of how this Big East season will play out.

Pitt did a lot of things right. It had a 43-31 rebounding edge. It hustled to block seven shots. It came back from a 57-51 deficit with 5¹/₂ minutes left to lead, 63-62, with 10 seconds to go. It held Villanova to 33.9 percent shooting. Thanks primarily to Keith Benjamin's tireless defensive work, it held Villanova star Scottie Reynolds to one field goal and four points.

Here's hoping Ward and Miller were able to put aside their disappointment from the Steelers' crushing loss Saturday night and watch a little of the Pitt game. They would have loved Pitt's effort.

But, in the end, Pitt came up short. It was outrebounded, 16-12, in the final 15 minutes and couldn't find the energy to get to a loose ball at the most important time, after Villanova's Malcolm Grant missed an off-balance layup with 15 seconds remaining. Then, after Villanova took the lead, 64-63, Pitt failed to get off a shot in the final seconds because Ronald Ramon lost the ball coming off a screen. Don't be too hard on Ramon, though. He's a fine shooting guard, but he's miscast -- out of necessity -- as Fields' replacement at the point. He and Benjamin, who also played some point guard, each had five turnovers.

That ball should have been in Fields' hands at the frantic finish.

"We're not going to focus on what we don't have, we're going to focus on what we do have," Dixon said, fairly growling.

Good luck with that.

A lot of us are ready to make excuses for Pitt because it lost Cook to a knee injury in the win against Duke Dec. 20 -- a win that jumped it to No. 6 in The Associated Press poll -- and then Fields to a broken foot in the loss at Dayton Dec. 29. But the season will spoil in a hurry if the Pitt players start buying into those excuses and start feeling sorry for themselves.

Too many more deflating losses like this one will do that to a team.

And it's not as if more aren't ahead now that the Big East's rugged play has started, you know?

Certainly, it's not as if the other Big East teams are going to ease up on Pitt because of its problems.

"No, I haven't gotten a lot of sympathy calls from our opponents' coaches," Dixon said, wryly.

Villanova's Jay Wright didn't telephone, but he did express his admiration yesterday for how Pitt battled -- "They're a true Big East team" -- and acknowledged the game might have been different if Cook and Fields had played, especially Fields. "This is a game where Levance Fields steps up big time."

But Fields wasn't there. He won't be there when Pitt faces another road challenge at South Florida Wednesday night. He probably won't be back before March 1.

"We're not going to hang our heads," Dixon said, sticking to his story. "We've just got to find our way."

I repeat: Good luck with that.