Connecticut basketball players were still looking for bellies to bump and already the chant from the stands left no doubt what was expected of them next.
“We want Duke! We want Duke!” The demand rolled from UConn’s small corner of Tropicana Field after the dismissal of Ohio State 64-58 Saturday, though those urging the errand will only have to watch. This is a little like the steer wishing for the butcher.
“Why not Duke?” UConn guard Ricky Moore asked. “We were No. 1. Then they were No. 1. The game for No. 1 should be between No. 1s, shouldn’t it?”
The young man has a future as a matchmaker, if not an NBA draft choice.
Duke subsequently cooperated as expected, discarding the other half of the Big Ten’s twin perils, Michigan State, setting up just such a final Monday night. Thus does the Big Ten again bow early, not disgraced but not exalted either.
“You get to this point,” Ohio State coach Jim O’Brien said, “and you never know when you’re going to get the opportunity to get back. When you think in terms of two games or even one game from playing for the national championship, it’s almost surreal.”
Isn’t that why they call it March Madness? And yet it is going to finish as it should, completely sane, with the two best teams in the country on the floor at the end.
“We feel we’ve got a better basketball game left in us,” UConn coach Jim Calhoun said.
Confidence is not a problem for Connecticut, not like, oh, inside defense, shot selection or, judging by the waistline of its star point guard Khalid El-Amin, second helpings of everything.
A team as flawed as this ought not be so full of itself, though it is certainly full of something.
“We are 33-2,” Calhoun said, arguing against an insult ungiven. “We’ve played some good people and won some games. We’ve averaged 80 points a game.”
Any suggestion that Connecticut should just take its licks and be grateful to share the same space as Duke, while making sense in the real world, is more evidence that Connecticut does not get the respect and notice it deserves.
It took Connecticut 60 years to get to this game, while Duke has been making it almost an annual rendezvous. Last dance, different partners. UConn has had its nose pressed up against the window so long it looks like a decal.
And now here UConn is, because on this night, with both teams playing three-guard lineups, the Husky guards were better than Ohio State’s guards, especially Moore’s defense on Scoonie Penn.
“He cut the head of the dragon off,” Calhoun said.
To put some numbers to the surgery, as Calhoun was only too glad to do, Penn shot only 3 for 13, scoring 11 points. Moore was miffed that Penn scored any points.
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“He made some terrific shots, some acrobatic shots,” Moore said. “Can’t do nothing about them.”
“As Scoonie goes, so goes Ohio State,” Calhoun said. Scoonie fall down and go boom.
The other half of the OSU backcourt, Michael Redd, shot only 7 for 18 for 15 points, while the player Redd had to guard, Richard Hamilton, scored 24 and El-Amin scored 18.
“Our pride stepped up,” El-Amin said. “We felt threatened that another backcourt could outdo us.”
Critical moment of the game came on a shot from Hamilton at the shot-clock buzzer with less than a minute and a half to play, the last basket for either team following a bizarre timeout sequence that probably should have been a UConn turnover.
UConn center Jake Voskuhl lost the ball and juggled it back to himself, normally a traveling call, but El-Amin was allowed by official Larry Rose to call timeout in mid-goof. Instead of being down by four with more time and the ball, Ohio State went down six and never recovered, not that the Buckeyes were likely to win in any case.
“We were beaten by a better team,” O’Brien said. “It’s a fitting ending for them anyway, with all the success they’ve enjoyed throughout this past decade. For them to get an opportunity to play for the national championship, I think, is fitting.”
Connecticut would be the last bunch to disagree with that.
“It has been one of my dreams all my life to play in a championship game in front of the whole world,” El-Amin said.
Sure, no one should live to be 21 without doing it at least once.