Pittsburg ? As basketball players Aaron Jackson and Stephen Wood lay helpless in front of a Duquesne University dormitory, bullet after bullet flew by them – and the same thought crossed each of their minds.

“It seemed like the bullets never stopped coming,” Jackson said Monday.

“They kept coming, constantly,” Wood said.

Five Duquesne players were struck by those bullets early Sunday morning by an unidentified shooter or shooters that injured nearly half of the team’s scholarship athletes.

On Monday, three players remained hospitalized. Junior-

college transfer forward Sam Ashaolu, 23, of Toronto, a cousin of former Houston Rockets star Hakeem Olajuwon, was in critical condition, his life in danger, after a bullet shattered and separated into three sections of his head.

Stuard Baldonado, 21, a 6-foot-7 forward and another junior college transfer, of Colombia, was upgraded to fair condition with left arm and back injuries.

He was told by surgeons that a bullet missed his spinal column by one-quarter of an inch before lodging in a lower back muscle.

Junior guard Kojo Mensah, 21, of New York City, who was shot in the arm and shoulder, was kept in the hospital to receive antibiotics.

Jackson, 20, of Hartford, Conn., and Shawn James, 23, of New York City were treated and released.

Several players said the shootings apparently resulted from an act of jealousy by a non-student unhappy that the girlfriend he accompanied to a dance, sponsored by the Black Student Union, talked with a player or players for the Dukes.

“We didn’t have any conflict at all,” said Wood, a freshman. “We were just having a good time. There was jealousy because girls were showing us attention.”

The players were followed by the disgruntled non-student and at least one of his acquaintances when they left the dance, they said, and the shootings happened as the players walked together toward the dormitory. Mensah, Ashaolu and Baldonado were the first to be hit; James was wounded on the foot but escaped by running across the nearby football field.

Wood, who was not struck, said he saw Baldonado bleeding badly from his left arm and quickly applied his shirt as a tourniquet.

“I turned away, and saw Stu on the floor, and my first reaction was to take my shirt off and try to stop the bleeding,” Wood said. “Then I turned around and I saw Sam laying there.”

Mensah, struck himself, aided several players by helping to barricade them behind a steel door. Jackson lifted the 250-pound Baldonado on his back, carried him to his car and drove him to nearby Mercy Hospital.

Baldonado likely won’t play this season because his back injury will need two to three months of rehabilitation. The bullet lodged in his lower back muscle is expected to be surgically removed today. Baldonado also was shot in the left arm, and doctors transplanted a vein from his groin to that arm during reconstructive surgery. The former Miami Dade player also has slightly less strength in one thumb than another, possibly because of nerve damage that normally heals itself.