No matter how good Merrimack might be, losing to a team transitioning to D-1 is bad, especially for a Power Five team.
So for former Duke star and assistant Chris Collins and his Northwestern team, after that loss, beating Providence was a big deal.
Collins said he told his team that you could either “lay down, or get off the pavement and fight.”
Clearly Northwestern chose to fight.
The Wildcats ran up a 20 point lead - and lost a big part of it - but still won.
It must come as a huge relief but Collins took a philosophical approach to the win: “We can’t overreact to tonight, just like we can’t overreact to what happened last Friday.