ORLANDO, Fla. — So the ingredients were there.
Top seed? Check. Florida was in the house, and as the de-facto home team to boot, Gainesville sitting less than two hours away from Amway Center. A confident top seed? You would hope so. The Gators came in on a tidy 26-game winning streak.
A 16 seed? Check. Albany was the third or fourth best team in its own conference but has developed a knack, under coach Will Brown, of playing its very best at the very end of seasons. So the Great Danes beat Stony Brook at Stony Brook for the America East conference title, then beat Mount St. Mary’s in the play-in game, and may have been as delighted a 16 as you’ll ever see.
Also, a confident one.
So you had those things in play Thursday afternoon, as the first 1 seed of the NCAA Tournament faced the first 16 seed, meaning this was the 117th time such a pairing would occur since the field expanded to 64 in 1985 and if there’s one thing even passing basketball fans know it’s the record of 16s versus 1s in these events:
0-116 heading into this one.
One of these years, we say, every year. One of these days, we say, that streak is going to end.
“A 16,” Brown said, “is going to beat a 1 at some point. We wanted to be that team.”
Eight years ago, Brown’s Great Danes joined the small fraternity of 16s who have thrown legitimate scares into a 1, leading UConn by 12 with 12 minutes to play. Whenever people talk about the task of a 16 playing a 1 they start — it’s a law — with Princeton-Georgetown, 1989; No. 2 is almost always Albany-UConn, 2006.
So the coach knows. Five of his players took part in last year’s NCAA challenge, against Duke. He knew they wouldn’t be spooked. And they weren’t spooked. They were savvy enough to rely on an old Princeton trick from that famous ’89 game.
“Take it one media break at a time,” senior forward Gary Johnson said. “Take it one segment at a time.”
By the first media timeout of the game, the Great Danes were up 9-5.
By the first media timeout of the second half, they were down by two.
And just after play resumed, 14 ½ minutes to go, Peter Hooley made a free throw. And this was the moment when regardless of your platform — Twitter, telephone, Facebook, face-to-face, whatever — the message was the same:
You near a TV? Turn it on!?
It was a tie game, 39-39.
A 16 is going to beat a 1 at some point …
This is the point when the dreams usually dissolve, when the cream rises, when strength becomes apparent. We’ve had 117 of these games now, maybe one in four that have had been competitive, and that’s a sizable sample. Patterns develop.
A lot of times the challenged 1 winds up using a five-minute blitz of talent, depth and skill that simply overwhelms the 16. It’s like when a big brother spots a kid brother maybe one too many points in a game to 11, and suddenly, before things get out of hand, a flurry ends the folly.
Princeton never let Georgetown have that flurry, and so they were still there in the 40th minute in Providence in 1989.
Albany?
After 26 minutes, it was too much. Florida battered them underneath. They kept pressing, and legs playing their third game in six days started to howl. The Gators got the lead back. Pushed it to five. Seven. Ten.
Around the country, channels clicked over.
In Orlando, the Gator-friendly fans sighed. The Albany players hugged, and savored their moment in the sun, looked up as the final score, 67-55, became real, and quietly became the 117th 16 seed to fall to a 1.
“We wanted to shock the world,” senior guard D.J. Evans said.
Some day, some year, one of them will.