You go into the NCAA tournament praying to see just one game like this, a back-and-forth battle between teams stocked with players as smart as they are talented, a game where somebody gets a big lead and the other guy comes back from an impossible deficit with little time remaining. You dream of seeing one of those all-time classics where the winners are too dazed to make much sense of how they persevered and the losers fall to the floor in an agony they never knew could hurt so bad.
This was such a game. It's a good thing I don't have to tell you the story of Illinois vs. Arizona because I lost my voice with about 38 seconds left in regulation, just like the other 16,957 in this joint who screamed their lungs out when a kid named Deron Williams hit a game-tying three-pointer that brought Illinois back from 15 down to tie the game at 80. It's a good thing I can check my notes and the official play-by-play as to how Illinois came back to win, 90-89 in overtime, on the strength of Williams's three-point shooting and final-possession defense, because it wouldn't quite make sense without confirmation to help reconstruct the miracle victory and the crushing defeat.
While Illinois vs. Arizona lacks a signature play, like Grant Hill throwing the ball to Christian Laettner, it didn't lack anything else, certainly not effort, intensity, passion, and absolutely not drama. It's way up on the short list of Greatest Comebacks Ever. It has to be the greatest victory in 100 years of Illinois basketball, by far. And it's hard to imagine Arizona has ever suffered a more discouraging defeat.
"They're in there right now crying their eyes out," the father of an Arizona player said while Illinois players cut down pieces of the net to celebrate their berth in the Final Four. The game was over, I swear to you, when Arizona was ahead 75-60 with four minutes to play. The Arizona kids had played the game of their lives. They were pounding Illinois unmercifully. Even while Illinois was fighting back to within single digits, there was never any thought the outcome was in question, not beyond the Illinois bench anyway. Arizona was quicker, stronger. The Wildcats players looked to be just a little bit more skilled. And once they knew that, early in the second half, they aggressively built their big lead.
I was in the process of looking up how many games Coach Lute Olson had won in his career, preparing to write a column about how this might have been the sweetest one of all, even with the four trips to the Final Four at Iowa and then Arizona, even with the national championship he won eight years ago. All that was asked of Olson and Arizona was to go halfway across the country and win an NCAA region final against a top-ranked, top-seeded, once-beaten team, in the face of an ear-splitting crowd in the other guy's backyard. And he appeared to have done it. He appeared to have scored a triumphant homecoming victory of sorts since coaching up the road at Iowa, his first Final Four team in 1980 had been stocked with kids from right here in Chicago.
I was preparing to write a column about how Channing Frye and Hassan Adams, even without much help from the sweet-shooting Salim Stoudamire, had taken it right to Illinois and built an impressive, seemingly insurmountable lead.
And suddenly, while the credits were rolling on Arizona's victory, Illinois flipped the script and provided an ending worthy of the game that led up to it — unless you're an Arizona fan.
As dramatic as the tournament often is, with all the upsets and buzzer-beating shots that become part of college basketball history, the play is very often — how do I say this? — spotty. Games, even between the good teams, are often a matter of attrition. Tournament games have steadily declined in quality for the simple reason that there are fewer and fewer skilled players in college every year.
The big kids, such as Eddy Curry, Tyson Chandler and Kwame Brown, don't go to college in the first place. And the top wing players who do go, such as Carmelo Anthony, stay a year, maybe two, at best. So the games, regardless of the hype, are increasingly handed over to freshmen and sophomores who ought to be bench players, not starters, not kids who should be trying to carry their teams.
But none of that was the case with Illinois and Arizona. The tournament this year has been so much better because so many talented underclassmen remained in college. Arizona and Illinois are the leading examples, flashbacks of sorts to the 1980s when teams were chock full of players long on skill and high on basketball IQ.
You have to have both to build a 15-point lead on a team as good as Illinois. And you have to have both to come back from 15 down in a single-elimination circumstance.
Olson and his coaches will rack their brains to figure out how things turned around so quickly. You lose a game like this, you spend forever trying to assess blame, even if you never tell a soul. Somewhere, however, the blame has to turn into credit, and so much of it has to be awarded to Illinois Coach Bruce Webber for keeping his team believing it could win, and to Williams (22 points, 10 assists, great defense on Stoudamire the first half), Luther Head (20 points four steals), Roger Powell and Dee Brown.
Every time Illinois needed a steal and a bucket to stop the clock in those final frantic three minutes, Williams and Head seemed to come up with one or both. And the crowd, which has been so despondent, began to roar again. To Arizona's credit, again, the Wildcats cut a six-point overtime deficit to one point. And they had the final shot, which Adams missed. And in the bedlam, everybody knew they had seen something not just rare, but admirable, the tournament at its best, March at its absolute Maddest.
