Saint Peter’s enters Sweet 16 as NCAA tournament’s ultimate underdog

“I like it!” a man in a Saint Peter’s security uniform said while walking past on the sidewalk as Hatzipetrou gazed up at the banner.

“I’m on very little sleep right now,” Hatzipetrou said. “This is a historic moment for the state, for the city, for the neighborhood.”

A tiny Jesuit commuter school squeezed into a few blocks of a hardscrabble New York City suburb, Saint Peter’s last weekend became the most improbable Sweet 16 team in NCAA men’s basketball tournament history. It upset No. 2 seed Kentucky and No. 7 Murray State, earning the 15th-seeded Peacocks a 90-mile trip down the New Jersey Turnpike to Philadelphia, where Friday night they will face No. 3 seed Purdue.

In the opening rounds, America discovered senior forward KC Ndefo’s defensive menace, Coach Shaheen Holloway’s unmistakable Queens swagger and junior sharpshooter Doug Edert’s scraggily glorious mustache. The campus has basked this week as the country started to learn more about the school.

“For a lot of students who are at Saint Peter’s, they love the experience, the education,” Saint Peter’s President Eugene Cornacchia said in an interview. “But I think a part of them always thought, ‘I wish we were better known.’ Well, now everybody knows who we are.”

The school website crashed Thursday night as Saint Peter’s played Kentucky. When tickets for the round of 16 went on sale Saturday, that site crashed, too, and the school’s allotment still sold out in 41 minutes. Saint Peter’s sold $40,000 in merchandise out of the bookstore, where the shelves empty soon after they fill. Online apparel orders have come from every corner of the country.

“Including from Kentucky,” Cornacchia said. “Which I think is a blast.”

On Tuesday afternoon, the entire team walked behind a podium packed with microphones, placed arms around one another and faced a bank of television cameras from every station in New York City plus ESPN. Cars honked as they passed players on the street, and professors asked players to pose for photos before class. Cornacchia bruised his right ring finger from clapping so much during the Kentucky game, and it took two days for the swelling and purplish hue to recede. When Ndefo walked into his Latin American studies class, his teacher revealed that as the seconds ticked down during their victory, he cried.

Maybe some people here can’t sleep, but others are trying not to wake up.

“It really didn’t hit me yet,” Holloway said. “I’m still living in the dream.”

The ultimate underdog team comes from the ultimate underdog school. By design, Saint Peter’s attracts and provides aid to students who are the first in their families to attend college. More than 70 percent of the 2,134 undergraduate students are minorities. More than 60 percent live off campus. Saint Peter’s sits deep in the city, hemmed in by a high school, tan-brick apartments and Bergen Avenue, which within one block houses an Egyptian market, a Jamaican fruit stand, a Dominican restaurant, a Mexican cafe, two pizzerias and a pawnshop. Modest rowhouses line Montgomery Street across from Run Baby Run Arena.

“Our basic function is to educate first-generation students, to give them opportunities they otherwise would not have,” Cornacchia said. “And also to instill in students a sense of purpose in serving the community and giving back in society. It’s wonderful to produce CEOs, millionaires, billionaires in this world. If we do that, we want to make sure those students that come from Saint Peter’s have a responsibility to make the world a better place.”

Purdue has about 41,000 undergraduate students. Saint Peter’s claims roughly 34,000 living alumni but “a lot more that aren’t living,” Cornacchia said. “We’re here 150 years.”

A stream of students, alumni and locals poured into MacMahon Student Center on Tuesday afternoon seeking gear. A security guard at the front door directed them to a Starbucks stand. Kristyn Stukel, a food services employee at Saint Peter’s for the past 15 years, would greet them and walk them toward The Nest, the school’s merchandise shop, and offer a regretful explanation.

In both a bit of unfortunate timing and a sign of how unexpected the tournament success has been, The Nest is under construction. In the madness of the past four days, the shelves had been picked clean. All Stukel had left: a few XXL T-shirts, some small and medium polos and a couple of sweatshirts with an academic crest that left potential customers pursing their lips.

“They want the fighting Peacock,” Stukel said. “It’s great around here. They finally know who Saint Peter’s is. I have people I work with up the block who didn’t even know it was a college. I’m like, ‘How?’ ”

Alexandria Hall, a communications student from Turks and Caicos,…