NASHVILLE, Tenn. — We write poems about the miracles of March, because they do, literally, stay with us forever. You had better believe we’ll still be talking about what Norfolk State did to Missouri yesterday 30 years from now. We still remember every detail of that back-door play that lifted Princeton over UCLA 17 years ago.
The upsets define these splendid few weeks of the NCAA tournament.
But so do the near-misses. So does Georgetown narrowly escaping Princeton in 1989, and a half-court heave from Butler’s Gordon Hayward narrowly missing two years ago, and Connecticut narrowly holding off the Great Danes of Albany in 2007.
The truth is, we get far more of these teases than we ever get payoffs. More often than not, Syracuse finds a way to escape UNC-Asheville. More often than not, Vanderbilt figures out an escape hatch to elude Harvard.
More often than not, Florida State sneaks past St. Bonaventure.
“These are the games that make the tournament,” Mark Schmidt, the Bonnies coach, would say maybe half an hour after his 13th-seeded team’s splendid run would end with a 66-63 loss to No. 3 Florida State in a second-round East Regional game at Bridgestone Arena. “You got the ACC champions playing, and you got us, the little guys, right with them for 40 minutes. They made more plays than us to win the game. But we made them make those plays. They had to have every one.”
For a while yesterday, it looked like the Bonnies might win their first NCAA tournament game since 1970, since the East Regional final when they blew out Villanova but saw Bob Lanier limp off the court with a knee injury when Villanova’s Chris Ford tripped into him.
A school of 2,000 undergraduates was represented by at least that many alumni, and they were joined by the straggling fans of Texas and Cincinnati to create precisely the kind of atmosphere that enables games like these to become timeless and unforgettable March events. Florida State was rattled for a time. They fell behind by 10 in the first half, by nine early in the second, still trailed with just under seven minutes left in the game.
“They did a tremendous job,” Seminoles coach Leonard Hamilton said. “They were so well-prepared. We had some missed assignments that they created with their execution.”
But Florida State is a tremendous team. As Schmidt said: “You don’t win the ACC without lots of good players and lots of good coaches.”
But beyond that, the Seminoles were able to find it within themselves to do what the heavily-favored victims of past signature upsets don’t: just enough of a run, just enough of a push, to get there.
Missouri? At the end of the game, the Tigers looked like a bunch of players who had just been introduced before the opening tap, not a team that easily could have been a No. 1 seed. They allowed Norfolk State a late six-point lead, then allowed them a second chance once they tied it late, and in this tournament you don’t always get a third chance.
And shouldn’t. Andrew Nicholson, the Bonnies’ best player on the floor for much of the game, endured a midgame 0-for-7 lull. Florida State seized on it, mostly because its defense — which Duke and North Carolina, among others, can attest — is stifling when it’s good and suffocating when it’s great. And because … well, because you don’t win the ACC by accident.
And you don’t let your season die without incident.
So, yes, as they watched the Bonnies’ final flurry fall short, the Seminoles weren’t sure whether to exhale or to celebrate, so they did a little of both. They’d escaped. Most of the time, that’s the way it happens in this tournament. The great stories are authored by the upsets. The great teams are often forged by the upsets that didn’t quite get there.