MORGANTOWN — The story was already written and it had Alex Ruoff’s byline on it.

West Virginia had Radford by the throat, only two questions left to be answered. The first was how many points the Mountaineers would beat the small Virginia university by, the final tally being 89-to-54.

The more pressing story as the clock wound into its final few minutes was how many points Ruoff would finish with. He already had set the school record for 3-point shots made with nine and he had 38 points.

Another basket and he would have become the first Mountaineer since Lowes Moore scored 40 at Notre Dame on Jan. 25, 1978, almost 31 years ago.

And if he could have canned two more 3s and a free throw, he would have matched the Coliseum record for points scored by a Mountaineer, Wil Robinson having netted 45 points in 1971.

All of that was within his grasp and Coach Bob Huggins was willing to let him gun for it, knowing just how hard Ruoff had worked to shake off a shooting slump to reach this point.

So, as the clock clicked down, Huggins kept calling Ruoff’s number.

“I kept hearing their bench yelling ‘Shooter out!’ and they were pointing at me,” Ruoff said.

Pointing, but not covering him.

It was eerie situation in that Radford wanted to cover Ruoff, they just never could find him.

Every time he broke free and the ball was passed to him, the crowd gasped. Every time the ball went up in those closing minutes, it was almost as if the air were sucked out of the old building at the corner of Jerry West Boulevard and Patteson Drive.

Ruoff would shoot and the ball would bounce away. Three times he got open looks, looks he’d made all night as he finished with 9 for 14 shooting from 3-point range, but they just wouldn’t fall.

“When you catch the ball and hear a gasp from the crowd it’s kind of hard to shoot,” Ruoff admitted.

At one point, Huggins even looked at him and smiled and said, “How many plays do (we) have to run for to make a shot?”

Finally, with 1:28 left, Huggins took Ruoff from the game as the crowd stood and voiced its approval, not of his removal, but of the performance they had just witnessed.

“I’m glad he took me out. I was kind of embarrassed,” Ruoff admitted.

Again, he was not embarrassed because of the shots he was missing but by the fact that he was the only one shooting, that everything was centering around him as far as scoring points went.

Now don’t misunderstand, Alex Ruoff likes to score points. He is a shooter, a guy who can hit a 3, pump home a middle range jump shot or drive to the basket.

Why, Ruoff even topped off the evening with a dunk, which is something you see him do just about as often as Kevin Pittsnogle used to dunk the ball, which is not very often at all.

But Ruoff doesn’t want to be known simply as a shooter. His value to the Mountaineers is with his all-around play. The truth is on this evening he was almost forced into the role of scorer because Da’Sean Butler left early with foul trouble and he had to carry the burden.

Still, Ruoff managed to also contribute eight of WVU’s 48 rebounds and make five steals. He also was credited with one assist but easily could have had at least three others when nifty feeds led to either missed layups or fouls on the shot.

In fact, when you asked Ruoff what he can do as an encore, his answer was quite simply “15 assists.”

Before you say there’s no chance of that, his career high being “only” eight assists, consider that his career high in points was “only” 28 set against Auburn this year, a number he exceeded by 10.

Perhaps what makes Ruoff’s ability to go off at this point so meaningful is that it comes just two games after returning from an injury and at a time when he hasn’t exactly been lighting up the scoreboard.

Ruoff’s last three games had produced just 12 field goals, the same number of field goals he scored this game. And, over his last four games he had made just about one-third of his shots with 15 field goals in 44 attempts.

In fact, in those last four games he made but seven 3-point shots, two fewer than he made in this game.

Rather than wonder where his shooting eye went or blaming it on the injury or being rusty for missing a couple of games, Ruoff went to the coaches for help.

They made an adjustment, something with his thumb he would say, but as Huggins was to put it:

“I can’t fix it. They have to fix it. It’s a tribute to him.”

You might recall that last year Joe Alexander suffered a mid-season injury, then came back and went four of five games without hitting in double figures and slowly worked himself back into shape, then took off on spree that including four of five games where he scored 32, 32, 29 and 34 against Connecticut, Pitt, St. John’s and Connecticut again.

If Ruoff is following that pattern, it’s look out Big East.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.