Sometimes he comes to play. Other nights he's in la-la land. On Wednesday night, he was unconscious.

He's Pitt forward Chris McNeal, who put on a McClinic to lead Pitt to their 67-65 win over the Lions.

Get the picture? All it needs is a huge 6-foot-7-inch, 245-pound wooden frame that can score 22 points, 16 of them in the second half.

Then varnish it with a golden spurt in which McNeal scored 14 of his team's last 16 points -- he single-handedly put the Panthers in position to win the NIT first-round game and preserve their postseason.

Down 12 in the second half, Pitt decided to pound it inside.

"We knew we had to keep going down low," McNeal said. "We just wanted to come together and play some defense."

But McNeal uttered the key phrase: Down low.

"With Chris we thought we had a good matchup down low," Pitt Coach Paul Evans said. "He said, 'I can stay in there with two fouls,' because he knew he could score."

And man, did McNeal put on a show.

The curtains rose with 11:59 remaining in the game when Sean Miller fed him for a 16-foot jumper to knot things at 53. Then Jerry McCullough scored to give Pitt a 55-53 lead. As it turned out, McCullough would be the last Panther to score other than McNeal.

In succession for Pitt, McNeal tipped in a shot, hit a layup, canned a 12-foot jumper, a free throw, then another 16-footer.

Finally, with 11 seconds left, Miller lobbed the ball to McNeal for the game-winning layup. He was fouled and he hit the free throw.

"I told Coach to go to the bottom because I had the smaller man on me," McNeal said of his game-winning shot. "We chose to go to Darren (Morningstar), but Sean just happened to see me. I was outside positioning myself for the rebound. Sean got stuck outside and he hit me."

"We knew we were going to have a tough time with him," Penn State Coach Bruce Parkhill said. "He's big and strong and very skilled. I think it was fitting that the play that won the game for them was a play where there was nothing we could do about it."

Although freshman forward Matt Gaudio did try to do something about it. Gaudio knew containing McNeal on that last possession would be difficult, especially after he positioned himself to receive the lob.

"He (Gaudio) had a tough night," Parkhill said. "It really was a tough matchup for him."

It was a tough matchup for everyone.

"They're real strong," said DeRon Hayes, who scored 13 points in the first half but only six in the second. "They went out there and they were really aggressive offensively. They went after rebounds and that's what killed us the most."

McNeal crashed the boards eight times.

But one huge piece of the Panthers' inside game wasn't supposed to play Wednesday -- or was he? On crutches Wednesday morning with an ailing knee, no one, including Evans, thought the 6-foot-11-inch Eric Mobley would play. In fact, Mobley didn't even make the trip with the team. He showed up in State College Wednesday morning.

"My trainer's getting an extra bonus on this trip," Evans said. "He certainly caused some problems altering some shots down the stretch."

A quick healer, maybe. But to score 10 huge points and swat away a Hayes jumper in 22 minutes is miraculous.

Mobley, Pitt's designated dunker, actually bent the rim on the east basket after one of his thunderous dunks. His knee didn't seem to bother him.

What did seem to bother Penn State in the second half was Pitt's 2-3 zone defense. It helped to control the hot Hayes and as the Lions' perimeter shooting went awry, Pitt's inside game at both ends of the court started to sizzle.

"We switched a lot more after he went nuts in the beginning of the second half," Evans said. "Then when we went zone, the kids watched (Hayes) a little bit more."

In their final games at Penn State, Freddie Barnes scored 19 points and grabbed eight rebounds while Monroe Brown didn't shoot well, connecting on only three of his 13 shots.

Pitt's Miller scored his only points on a 3-pointer in the second half, but he grabbed eight rebounds and dished out 12 assists, including the game-winning lob to McNeal.

As it turned out, the Panthers really didn't need his scoring. They did, however, need his floor leadership, his zipping passes and his ballhandling abilities.

Notes: Will we see another installment of the in-state rivalry in the next 10 years? "Possibly," stated Evans. . . . Needless to say, the Pitt-Penn State game lived up to its billing. It had two rival bands and a raucous crowd. When asked to defend why the Panther band accompanied his team, Evans laughed. "We've taken them before. But I don't know about this year. This was a great atmosphere for a basketball game."