BOSTON -- The Vermont Catamounts waited more than a year for another chance to reach the NCAA Tournament, and they didn't let this one slip away.
David Hehn hit a 10-foot jumper with 5.6 seconds left to give Vermont a 56-55 victory over Boston University in the America East finals Saturday and its first trip to the NCAAs.
Tournament MVP Matt Sheftic scored 23 points to lead the Catamounts (21-11), who became the league's first No. 2 seed to beat a No. 1 seed in the tournament title game.
Last year the Catamounts were the top seed, but they lost to Maine in overtime in the semifinals.
"I always believed this day would come, and then last year I thought it was going to happen and it didn't," said Vermont coach Tom Brennan, in his 17th season. "This year I didn't think it was going to happen, but once we got on this little roll I knew we were playing as well as BU."
Chaz Carr came up short on a 3-pointer as time expired for the Terriers, last year's tournament champions. About 700 Vermont fans who made the trip down to Boston rushed the court to celebrate.
The Catamounts won the title even without star point guard T.J. Sorrentine. The America East player of the year in 2002, Sorrentine missed the entire season with two broken wrists.
After trailing by as many as 14 points in the first half, BU tied the game at 52 on Rashad Bell's putback with 4:47 left. Ryan Butt put BU ahead 55-54 by hitting a 3-pointer as the shot clock expired with 3:15 left.
The Terriers (20-10) maintained that lead and had the ball with 40 seconds left, but Paul Seymour turned it over.
After Vermont called timeout, Hehn drove on the right side with the shot clock winding down and hit a tough shot over the smaller Carr.
"As soon as it went in, I was thinking about all the guys and how this is our dream since the first time we touched a basketball," Hehn said.
Seymour scored 16 points to lead BU, and Jason Grochowalski added 11.
Germain Njila scored 12 points for the Catamounts. Taylor Coppenrath, this season's conference player of the year, added nine.
The first two rounds of the tournament were played at Walter Brown Arena, the hockey rink on Boston University's campus. The championship game was upstairs in Case Gym, where the Terriers play their regular-season games.
After BU scored the game's opening basket, Vermont broke off a 16-0 run to grab a 14-point lead with 12:21 left in the first half. The Terriers shot just 26.9 percent and were outrebounded 22-12 in the first half, but managed to cut the Catamounts' lead to 30-22 by halftime.
Seymour single-handedly brought BU back to 34-33 with 15:48 left, scoring all of his team's points in an 11-4 run.
Vermont pushed the lead back to 43-36, but BU took its first lead since the first basket with an 11-2 spurt -- capped by Butt's putback that gave the Terriers a 47-45 advantage with 8:15 to go.
"It's a tough thing in a game like this to always be running uphill," BU coach Dennis Wolff said. "They made one more play than we did, and they deserve to go."
The top two seeds have reached the championship game 11 times in the 21-year history of the conference. The top seed won the first 10 meetings.
The only other time Vermont even made it to the title game was 1990, when it lost to BU 75-57 at the Hartford Civic Center.
The teams split their two regular-season meetings.
AP NEWS
The Associated Press News Service
Copyright 2003, The Associated Press, All Rights Reserved
