East Regional | Edge: Villanova-UConn
BOSTON -- Oh ... my ... God.
I can't believe what I just saw.
Villanova 78, Pittsburgh 76, Goosebumps 1 Jillion.
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Villanova's Scottie Reynolds is the hero after hitting the last-second winner. (US Presswire) |
Thrilling, stunning, beautiful, grand, better than sex with triplets.
That was this game.
But before we go on, let me tell you about the last shot. The last shot.
If you were watching this gem from home, you have no idea how close Pittsburgh's Levance Fields came to actually winning the game for the Panthers and making the best basket in NCAA tournament history.
With a half-second left, Fields took the inbounds pass and, from three-quarters length of the court, launched a rocket.
The arena grew silent because everyone could see that the shot was on target. And I mean, radar locked. Time seemed to slow down and you could hear a pin drop as the ball sailed through the air.
"It was right on target to go in," said Villanova guard Scottie Reynolds. "A little less on the shot and we'd be in another position."
It banged the top of the glass fairly hard. If it had hit just a little softer, it would've gone in. The shot was just several inches away from becoming Christian Laettner against Kentucky times 10.
Yes, it was that close.
That's how great this game was. Even a wild, Hail Mary shot almost made it in.
This game was made on two plays. The first came with Villanova leading 76-74 with eight seconds left: Reggie Redding made an inexplicable pass the length of the court to Dante Cunningham. It led to a Wildcats turnover and Fields making two free throws to tie the score at 76 with five seconds left.
That's how these games go. Imagine what Redding's life would be like if Villanova had lost. He might be the college basketball equivalent of Bill Buckner.
The second was, of course, the stunning play of Reynolds, who drove from half-court for the winning shot.
The play almost didn't happen. Villanova came close to not getting the ball inbounds.
"It looked for a minute like they [were] having trouble getting it in," said Fields. "If it has been one more second probably could have been a five second [call]. They had no timeouts so we did a good job of denying for about three to four seconds."
The Reynolds play is something the team practices almost daily and went pretty much just as the Wildcats practiced it. There are basically two passes and then Reynolds turns on the jets. Reynolds calls it an "instinct play." Others will call it a "holy crap" play.
"When we made the shot," Reynolds explained, "everybody just rushed the court. I didn't even see the ball go in, actually."
Again, in yet another twist, at least twice while driving hard across the floor, Reynolds almost lost the basketball.
Those are the plays that will be talked about for some years to come. To enter the Final Four so spectacularly is an achievement for the ages.
Yet in the context of the entire game it was actually lost by the Panthers much earlier than the final seconds of heroics. Pittsburgh was leading Villanova 67-63 with 3:24 left. The Panthers were in control until they turned the basketball over several times and changed the complexion of the final minutes.
Pittsburgh's Sam Young said his team's turnovers in those few minutes gave Villanova "a little bit of momentum. ... And I think from that point when they got back into game, a moment where it felt like we had it done, it was anybody's game."
The Panthers got sloppy and they paid for it. But for the entire tournament the Panthers have been sloppy.
In the end, that's the key. In this game, the Panthers did what they always do, which is play with fire. They've done it so many times in this tournament their fingers are scorched to the bone. You can be David Blaine when facing the scrubs that Pittsburgh did before fighting the Wildcats, but the level of play had to be different this time.
For the most part, it was. They finally played hard and smart. but the Panthers proved their critics -- which included me -- right. The Panthers were a vastly overrated No. 1 seed.
The one time in the tournament they faced a team as talented as them, they lost.
That isn't a coincidence.
Before the madness, before the Wildcats joined the Final Four for the first time since 1985, Reynolds glared at teammate Dante Cunningham just seconds before the game began. "You've got to be a beast," Reynolds told Cunningham. "You've got to be The Man."
Reynolds was preparing Cunningham for his battle against DeJuan Blair, Cunningham's big-boned counterpart from Pittsburgh. To continue Reynolds' beast analogy, Cunningham was Godzilla and Blair was Mechagodzilla.
It was a good battle. Not exactly Hansbrough versus Griffin, but it was solid.
Yet the real star was the game itself, a delicious and historical moment that was part spit, part elbow grease and part tense thriller.
What a game. What a damn unbelievable game.
