Villanova and North Carolina made 4.7 seconds in Houston last forever
HOUSTON -- The greatest shot in NCAA title game history had just left Kris Jenkins' hands. The clock read four-tenths of a second, the scoreboard read 74-74. "Bang," head coach Jay Wright said to himself as the ball escaped the outstretched arms of North Carolina's Isaiah Hicks. The clock hit zero, the scoreboard lit up in red, and the ball rattled through the hoop.
"In a national championship game, to hit a shot at the buzzer? I haven't seen many better than that," Wright would say afterward.
You can make a case that the final 4.7 seconds of Monday night's thrilling national title game were the most dramatic 4.7 seconds in college basketball history. Marcus Paige, UNC's star senior, had just drained an impossibly difficult double-clutch three-pointer to tie the game for the first time since 13:33 was left in the second half. At that point, with 4.7 seconds left on the clock and the momentum swinging UNC's way, Paige's circus shot might have won the award for greatest shot in title game history.
"We believed we were going to win," Paige said about his three-pointer. "You don't know how much our team wanted this game."
Wright's team called a timeout. They knew which play was coming. After all, they practice this play at every single practice. Center Daniel Ochefu had grabbed the mop and scrubbed up a slice of the court near the top of the key: He knew where the play was going; he didn't want to slip, and he didn't want Ryan Arcidiacono to slip. Jenkins inbounded the ball. Arcidiacono raced it up the court. Ochefu set a screen for Arcidiacono on the exact spot where he'd just mopped. And then Arcidiacono heard a voice screaming from behind him: "ARCH! ARCH! ARCH!" It was Jenkins, the final option on the play, but someone who found himself forgotten by Carolina's defense after he had inbounded the ball. Arcidiacono dropped the dime. Jenkins let it rip.
"One two step, shoot 'em up, sleep in the streets," Jenkins said later.
Bang.
"We knew it was good," said Villanova forward Darryl Reynolds. "It was the weirdest thing: It was the longest time a ball has been in the air. (But) you knew it was good."
Game over, one of the finest title games we have ever seen and ever will see, with the first buzzer-beating three-pointer in NCAA title game history.
Arcidiacono raced to the other end of the court and was soon at the bottom of a dogpile. He took a teammate's elbow to the nose and didn't care. Phil Booth, who led Villanova with 20 efficient points, climbed into the stands to hug his mother in tears. And Jenkins stood on the press table courtside, flexed his muscles and yelled, to nobody and everybody, "I HAVE ICE IN MY VEINS!"
This was the perfect and climactic ending to what had been an anticlimactic college basketball season in general and NCAA tournament in particular. It was everything you love about March Madness, distilled into 4.7 seconds.
"Something everyone dreams about," said Arcidiacono, the tournament's most outstanding player.
"That feeling of walking off the court, feeling the confetti fall, but it's not for you -- it's a horrible feeling," said North Carolina's Joel Berry II.
There are so many winners in Monday night's title game. There's Jay Wright, who stamped his ticket to the Hall of Fame when Jenkins' shot tore through the net. There's the Villanova fan base, starved for a second title since the "Perfect Game" 31 years ago. There's the intensely hard-working and insanely likable group of Villanova players, one of the easiest groups to root for in all of college hoops; when they watched the "One Shining Moment" video, when they cut down the nets, when they lifted the trophy, you knew you were watching something they will all tell their grandkids about.
Perhaps most of all, there's the Big East. The greatest college basketball conference there's ever been was torn apart at the seams just a few years back. Conference realignment had left seven private, Catholic, basketball-focused schools out in the cold. At that point, the very existence of big-time basketball at those schools was threatened. And yet they banded together, found a few other like-minded schools, and struck out on their own. There were doubters, and the doubters' voices only grew louder when the new Big East didn't make noise in March those first two years. In 4.7 seconds, those doubters were forever silenced.
But this Monday night in Houston not about big-picture takeaways. It was about the greatest 4.7 seconds in college basketball history, and about one player who heard his teammate shouting for the ball, who entrusted his teammate to make history, and sure enough, he did.
Follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave or email him at ReidForgrave@gmail.com.
