One more time, the Connecticut Huskies needed to summon the kind of March moxie that busts brackets and keeps local travel agencies afloat. One more time, with the seconds bleeding away at Madison Square Garden, with the old gym on top of Penn Station shaking with thunder, there was only one place to go.
One more time, there was Shabazz Napier.
The Huskies had electrified the Garden with a 26-7 splurge that had turned nine down into 10 up, had turned the joint, one more time, into what Tom Izzo had called it Saturday — “UConn South.” But the Spartans had one more run left in them, so now it was 53-51, the shot clock melting, the game clock bleeding.
“I know about these guys’ heart,” UConn coach Kevin Ollie said. “Heart of a lion. Heart of a champion.”
Once, these moments had belonged to another flashy Huskies guard named Kemba Walker. In 2011, it was Walker who kept making shots, kept making plays, kept refusing to allow Connecticut’s magical, maniacal run through the brackets to end. Napier had been a freshman on that team.
“Watching Kemba,” Napier had said a few days ago, “taught me — should have taught everyone — that when people say anything is possible in March, it’s not just talk. Anything really is possible.”
Now it was Napier’s turn to explore those possibilities. Michigan State had all the momentum, the Spartans had their portion of the Garden screaming itself silly, and the ball was in Napier’s hands, top of the key, a step and a half north of the tip of the 3-point arc. Keith Appling was blanketing him. Napier squared. He fired.
“[Appling] was thinking I’d go to the basket,” Napier said. “I’d hit a shot right before that and I was feeling comfortable. He hit my wrist, it made me shoot an airball, and I waited to hear a whistle.”
Then the whistle came.
You saw Michigan State’s spirit break right there, 30.3 seconds left in the Spartans’ season. Connecticut would wind up making 21 of the 22 free throws it attempted in the game. The Huskies took 18 of them in the second half. They made all 18.
And most, like Napier’s, didn’t need a rim.
“You just have to step up,” he said, “and knock them down.”
Swish. Swish. Swish.
It would end 60-54. A year after the Huskies had been denied one last trip to the Garden for their final Big East Tournament, they would craft their own Garden party out of this East Regional, they would beat up on Iowa State and race past Michigan State. Maybe the 2011 run was more improbable. But not by much.
“They play hard, tough,” Izzo said. “They keep coming after you.”
They were pushed to overtime by St. Joseph’s in their first game, had to slay old friend Villanova in the second, just to survive Buffalo. Now you have to say they are playing as well as anybody, and that includes Florida, the tournament’s top seed, the sport’s No. 1 team, owner of a 30-game winning streak that dates to the second day of December.
To a 65-64 loss to UConn.
Napier was brilliant that day, too, 26 points and five 3s and three steals, outplaying Scottie Wilbekin in what will surely be the featured matchup this time around, too, when the teams meet Saturday night in Arlington, Texas.
“It was a dogfight, a tough game, and it went right to the end,” Napier said. “And I expect it to be the same thing down there.”
He has rarely been better than he was Sunday, early in the second half, after the Spartans seized a 32-23 lead and seemed ready to run the Huskies back to the Merritt Parkway then and there. His 3 started the run with just over 16 minutes to go. Four free throws tied the game. And a 3 with 8:05 left extended a two-point lead to five, on the way to a 49-39 cushion that they’d need every inch of before it was over.
“We didn’t want to think too far ahead,” Napier said. “Now we have to keep moving on.”
One more road trip, one more step in the bracket. Two of UConn’s three national titles have come in Texas, one in Houston, one in San Antonio. Now they get the Dallas suburbs to try to make it a Texas trifecta. They won’t be favored to do that. Why should this be any different?