Kentucky's dream ends but the reality is we'll never forget this team

INDIANAPOLIS -- When dreams end there's never clarity. When dreams abruptly finish they can't bring closure. There's always that fog that you've got to clear out of.

Kentucky's players will linger in that kind of haze through the night, into Sunday and for who knows how long after. Dreams end and you don't feel shock: You feel confused. You feel puzzled.

What just happened?

"You know, I told my wife before the game, 'We could lose,'" John Calipari said. "They're good enough to beat us. I'll live with it."

Turns out, Wisconsin was plenty good enough. Calipari will have to live with it, and also live with an impressive resume that has an interesting twist. He's now made four Final Fours with Kentucky, at a time when the program has never been more powerful, but "merely" has one national championship to his name.

"I feel bad for our community, let alone us," UK's Willie Cauley-Stein said. "Going 38-1, our fans have so much to be proud of, and we're proud of our fans. That's what kind of weighing on me. I wanted to hold a trophy off the bus, off the plane and hear everybody go crazy. Lord knows there [was] going to be 10,000 people at the airport. They're still going to be there but it's gonna be a different feeling."

How does a dream die? It starts to turn when there's 2:35 remaining in a game and a man named Nigel Hayes is draped by Karl-Anthony Towns in the paint yet still slips a shot into the hoop to tie the score at 60 when a shot-clock violation, in reality, should have occurred.

"Can't blame it on the refs -- that was on us," Devin Booker said. "We've faced bad refs all season, and it's sad to say, but we're kind of used to that."

The dream gets threatened when a man named Sam Dekker strikes a thunderclap into Lucas Oil Stadium after sinking a 3-point shot with 1:44 left that puts you down three points.

"I still don't believe it," Trey Lyles said. "It's hard to think about. Doesn't feel like reality at all."

The threat increases when Lyles turns it over, then Dekker walks back to his end of the floor and yells, "Come on, man!" to the rising Wisconsin crowd. The dream becomes more endangered when Dekker sinks a foul shot to make it a four-point game with 66 seconds left in your season.

"Sometimes we weren't playing our hardest, and they played the whole game," Booker said. "I thought the run was going to come when we were up four and were going to pull away."

It has to for UK. It's gone that way for the past five months. The run always comes. The escape hatch appears. Even with a minute to go, it seems like another game, another win, is going to break your way. So Aaron Harrison draws block on Frank Kaminsky and secures a three-point play to make it a one-point game with 56.2 seconds left.

Dream still going, still playing out, but a dimness is dawning.

And then it just sinks into blackness.

"It's like a movie ... like ... the main character dies," Willie Cauley-Stein said. "And you're like, 'What?! Why did the main character die?' And you're just, like, super-hurt over the main character dying, or the good guy, the guy you never suspect is going to die ends up dying. No cliffhangers, no nothing. That's the way it feels."

A dream dies -- a hero's season dies, a hope of 40-0 and immortality -- when free throws finish out the final 56 seconds of a Final Four game that will never be forgotten in Madison and always be remembered in Lexington. The dream evaporates when Aaron Harrison's 3-point shot falls left and wrong, failing to even touch iron.

Harrison knows it. The ball doesn't feel right when he shoots it. It doesn't flick off his fingers -- it's pushed off his palm, flat.

"My team depends on me to put other teams away, make big shots, and I let my team down," Aaron Harrison said. "I knew it was short."

Wisconsin will win, and the awakening is imminent. Andrew and Aaron Harrison, twin brothers, unintentionally mimic each other, both bent over with their hands tugging at their shorts and their faces facing the floor.

"I don't want to say we know we were the best team, but we know we could have finished that game off," Aaron Harrison said.

Player of the Year Frank Kaminsky is hopping like a goofball just before Tyler Ulis' meaningless 3-point shot is chucked into the air, and as the ball is in flight, Kaminsky is already bee-lining for his teammates.

"I can't explain how I feel," Ulis said. "Basically, at the end of the day, all the wins didn't mean much."

Kaminsky's celebrating before the game technically ends. He leaps into the arms of bench players and the mobs scene is on. Kaminsky is handed a "MAKE 'EM BELIEVE" shirt and yelling the slogan at the Wisconsin fans.

"I don't know, right now I don't feel anything right now," Aaron Harrison said. "I want to feel something. I'm pretty numb. I can't explain how disappointed I am, in myself, really."

***

The 2014-15 Kentucky Wildcats gave college basketball one of its best stories in years. They captivated and rallied the country, enticing millions upon millions to tune in Saturday night and see if they could win just one more game, their 39th game, to play in the sport's final game on Monday night.

But they couldn't, so they won't. We're all robbed of something historic with Kentucky and Duke, but Wisconsin-Duke is an incredible consolation prize.

Wisconsin stabbed a sword into Kentucky's heart, giving this incredible team its one and only loss of the season. Twenty-four years after undefeated UNLV was taken down by a talented underdog team headed to its first national championship, Wisconsin provided a similar script.

Both games took place in Indianapolis. Both games were national semifinal rematches and revenge wins. Wisconsin will close out the circle if it does what Duke did in '91 -- ironically enough -- needing now to beat the Blue Devils.

Lucas Oil held a swirl in its air above 72,238 people in the building on Saturday night. UK and UW traded jabs and jolts for 38 minutes. Wisconsin had the lead for most of the game, but Kentucky had runs. This time, unlike the Notre Dame escape, Kentucky couldn't turn the ship against the chop.

"It just doesn't feel real yet," Dakari Johnson said.

Even though Kentucky shot better from the field, had fewer turnovers, more blocks and more steals. Offense won, defense lost. Wisconsin is going to finish this season as the highest-rated team with the ball in the history of KenPom. It jumped a full point after this game, going from 127.5 points per 100 possessions to 128.5.

Against the best defense in the modern era. A defense a lot of people were ready to call the best ever if it went 40-0.

"I mean, they out-rebounded us by 12 rebounds. That doesn't happen," Calipari said. "You think about this. We had six turnovers for the game. We shot 90% from the free-throw line, 60% from the three, and 48% from the field, and we lost? What does that mean they did?"

The Kentucky players slowly marched toward the locker room after it ended. Some instinctively walked off the court prior to the handshake line, but they were pulled back on. When Calipari addressed his team in private, the players were buried in their lockers as he spoke of pride over a season that was tremendous.

"This is the most surreal, unreal loss I've ever had and it's going to be hard to deal with in the next couple of days," Lyles said.

Some UK players, like Booker and Johnson, said it was a state of shock. Marcus Lee was frank in his disappointment.

"I can't even explain what's going on; I have no words for it," Lee said. "You lost a game. That's how it feels. It's not imaginary, it's not a dream. It happened. Now deal with it. ... This feeling sucks."

Lyles added, "Right now for me, I'm pretty sure as time goes on I'll think about it more, but right now I just feel like those 38 games we won is a waste."

They'll sell "38-1" T-shirts in Madison for the next 100 years. It's an incredible accomplishment, no matter what happens Monday night.

For Kentucky, it's a season that's exceptional. And for every rule, there is an exception. The modern one in college basketball is simply: going undefeated is impossible. Wisconsin is the exception to Kentucky. Kentucky is the exception to college basketball. There is no program like this, there is no other team who could have come so close to attainting the impossible.

"They just had an historic year," Calipari said. "Don't you look at anything else. There's not one kid in this team that would be blamed for us losing this game. If you want to blame somebody, blame me."

There's no blame here. The dream dies but the vision of this team's accomplishments and reputation will stay for a long time. We just saw something special. That goes for what happened Saturday night, and what transpired over the past five months. This was an unforgettable season.