The joint was exhausted. It was well past midnight, well past the point when there are usually still people screaming themselves hoarse at Madison Square Garden. And yet the people couldn’t help themselves, because Virginia and Michigan State couldn’t help themselves.
There were only 1.4 seconds left in the game, and the mathematics at hand weren’t promising. Michigan State was up 61-59. Gary Harris was at the line for the Spartans. Of course the notion that Virginia could pull a miracle out of the sky was absurd but, then, what is this NCAA Tournament without an abundance of reliance on the absurd?
Harris missed on purpose. Justin Anderson got the rebound. The clock started dashing toward zeroes, and Anderson managed to wiggle free to the top of the key, and he managed to get a clean shot off …
… and if you were standing behind the Michigan State basket, or if you were standing behind the Virginia basket, you felt your heart leap a little. It was right on line. Are you kidding? It was right on line …
… but if you were anywhere else inside the Garden, you knew just as well: not enough mustard, not enough steam, not enough loft.
Not enough pixie dust.
“That,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said, “is the way the game should be played.”
In the middle of the country last night, Kentucky and Louisville had themselves an old-fashioned blood feud in Andrew Luck’s office. Virginia and Michigan State don’t have that kind of inherent hate, don’t have that history. And yet they gave us a late night and an early morning to remember at the Garden, gave us a post-midnight show that will make you wonder what the Garden might have in store for us Sunday afternoon.
“This,” Virginia coach Tony Bennett said, “is what it’s about to coach college basketball.”
This was a different kind of game than the freewheeling Connecticut-Iowa State pop-a-shot contest that preceded it — in the way that Greco-Roman wrestling is a different kind of game than ice dancing.
You want wide-open looks? Turn the channel.
You want uncontested layups? Turn on the Knicks game.
You want defense, get-after-it defense, 94-feet, palms-up, clog-the-passing-lane, make-all-the-coaches-in-attendance-weep-with-glee defense? Yes. This was your game. It is a testament to just how highly skilled and finely tuned these two teams are that the score wasn’t 18-15, the way some defensive-minded games can be, especially in the survive-and-advance portion of the season.
But make no mistake: Every shot was contested. Every passing lane was pursued. Michigan State took a quick 10-point lead and you wondered if the poor Cavaliers were ever going to actually get a full, decent look at the basket. But they did, primarily by grinding their own gears defensively.
It was 31-27 at the break and in a lot of way it was as beautiful as a half can be. Virginia made its bones this year by sneaking up on people, by being taken for granted, by others waiting for the wahoos to regress, as seemed inevitable, and the problem with that strategy is that we’re still waiting.
Michigan State? You know what you’re getting with the Spartans, because you almost always get the same thing: a team built out of the profile of their coach, Tom Izzo; a team that will leave you bruised after 40 minutes yet still manages to play crisp, sound offense, too.
“Over the years,” Izzo said Thursday afternoon, “I think one of the successes we have had as a program is we could play racehorse or smash mouth. We have been able to play both.”
Sometimes on consecutive possessions. Sometimes, in fact, on the same possession. Right to the end. Right to the buzzer, long past midnight, long past the point where you retained the ability to be surprised by anything the NCAA may have in its bag of tricks.