The Illini were not going to make it to St. Louis and a Final Four that they had all but embraced as their birthright. The scoreboard said so. With 54 seconds left to play, Illinois was down 80-72 to Arizona, and the crowd in the Allstate Arena, practically the Illini's home floor, was hushed.
But then a miraculous 15 seconds was visited upon the Illini on Saturday night, and the college basketball gods reached out and touched their three guards: Luther Head, Dee Brown and Deron Williams. The trio had carried the team through a 36-game journey in which 35 games had ended with victory.
Now they needed a shortcut, and it was Head who initiated the path with a 3-point bomb that cut the Wildcats' lead to 80-75. As Hassan Adams of Arizona tried to cross halfcourt, Williams and Brown pounced on him. Williams stripped the ball and kicked it to Brown, who streaked in for a layup.
It was 80-77, with 46 seconds left. The Illini scrambled into a full-court press, and in an instant, Jack Ingram was batting an inbounds pass loose from Arizona's Channing Frye. The ball bounded into Williams' hands; he squared up in the corner behind the 3-point arc and fired.
The ball swished through the net. Illinois and Arizona were knotted at 80-80, and 39 seconds were left in the game.
When the Wildcats' Salim Stoudamire was unable to duplicate the game-winning heroics that sank Oklahoma State in the semifinals of the Chicago Regional, the game was heading into overtime.
Once there, Illinois hardly needed a miracle. It had Williams, who drained two more 3-pointers. Along with Head and Brown, he electrified the crowd that had been silent only moments earlier with a 90-89 overtime victory in the regional final that earned the Illini a trip to St. Louis after all.
"What an unbelievable game," said coach Bruce Weber, whose Illini were trailing by 15 with 4:04 remaining. "Our kids didn't quit. They got down 15 points in the second half. It was just crazy."
Arizona coach Lute Olson and his players had made it clear that they were happy to have been shipped here to take on Illinois, the top-seeded team in the NCAA tournament. Olson had already made four trips to the Final Four and had won a national title in 1997. The Wildcats (30-7) were talented and loose.
"We respect them," Olson, the 70-year-old coach, said before the game, "but we have no fear of them."
In fact, the last time Illinois and Arizona had faced each other in the tournament was 2001 in another regional final. The second-seeded Wildcats defeated Illinois, 87-81, to earn a trip to the Final Four.
In the first half, the Wildcats withstood a barrage of 3-pointers by Brown and Head, some rim-rattling dunks by Roger Powell and an acrobatic alley-oop from Head to Williams that had the Illinois faithful in hysterics. But as the buzzer sounded, Arizona was behind, 38-36.
Then Arizona unleashed an 11-3 run to open the second half, taking a 47-41 lead that was capped by a 3-pointer from the top of the key by Stoudamire. In the first half, under the withering defense of Williams, Stoudamire had four shots and two points.
Suddenly, the game was on more than even terms and memories of 2001 were resurrected by a fresh bunch of players. Adams, a junior forward, and Musafa Shakur, a sophomore guard, were coming up with steals and hitting their jump shots. Adams finished with 21 points and five assists; Shakur had 12 points, four assists and two steals.
Stoudamire was the nation's most accurate 3-point shooter. But with less than seven minutes left, Frye, the Wildcats' 6-foot-11 center, stepped beyond the arc to sink a 3-pointer, the most unlikely of his 24 points, to give Arizona a 70-58 lead.
But the inside play of the Illinois big men, Powell and Ingram, reeled the Wildcats back in. They gobbled up the rebounds of suddenly wobbly shots by Head, Williams and Brown and put them back in. Williams had 22 points, Head 20 and Brown 15.
Last season was the first at Illinois for Weber, and he immediately angered a team he had inherited from Bill Self, who left to coach Kansas. The transition from a wide-open game to a structured one was proving tough enough, but then Weber told the media that his team was not ready to reach the 2004 Final Four, which was held in San Antonio.
Instead, he said that he was pointing the Illini to this year's Final Four in St. Louis. His players took the comment as an expression of a lack of confidence. When they lost last year in the Round of 16, Weber did not say, "I told you so," but he reminded his players about the mental toughness needed for a long campaign with an epic goal.
On Saturday night, everything the Illini had worked for came down to 15 seconds. They proved they were mature enough to handle it, and graceful enough to recognize a miracle.
"It was just meant to be," Brown said.
Louisville 93, West Virginia 85, OT
The master motivator himself, Louisville coach Rick Pitino, admitted he was lying when he told his players at halftime he was sure they were going to beat West Virginia.
That's because Louisville's trip to the Final Four looked like a lost cause thanks to the Mountaineers' hotshot shooters.
Almost every road to a championship takes at least one unexpected twist, though, and none was more astonishing than the second-half rally the Cardinals staged Saturday to earn a 93-85 overtime win and a trip to college basketball's biggest stage.
"I've never seen anything like it in my life," Pitino said.
Cramping, limping, barely able to run, Larry O'Bannon scored 24 points and Taquan Dean had 23 to lead fourth-seeded Louisville (33-4) back from a 20-point deficit to the scintillating victory in the Albuquerque Regional final.
Seventh-seeded West Virginia (24-11), trying to make the Final Four for the first time since 1959, went home despite making 10 3-pointers in the first half and sending Pitino and the Cardinals into shock.
"I've never abandoned a whole scouting report at halftime," he said. "But it had to be abandoned."
Pitino instructed his players to scrap their zone defense, start trapping and pressing, and play more aggressively on offense. They followed his directions and, in doing so, they helped him make history -- becoming the first coach to take three men's programs to the Final Four.
First it was Providence, then Kentucky three times, and now this. The Cardinals will play Illinois next Saturday in St. Louis.
"Certainly, having been to three different schools, I have nothing but respect for him because I know how difficult it is," said Vivian Stringer, who did it on the women's side, with Cheyney, Iowa and Rutgers.
Louisville had every reason to pack it in after the Mountaineers took a 38-18 lead.
And it wasn't just that coach John Beilein's team made 11 of its first 16 field-goal attempts, or that it shot 10-for-14 from 3-point range in the first half, or that it made a total of 18 from long range, second to only the 1990 Loyola Marymount team in the history of the tournament.
It was also the way some of the shots fell.
Beilein's son, Patrick, banked one in from an awkward angle in front of the Louisville bench. He made another from the "B" in the New Mexico "Lobos" logo set about 10m from the basket.
"They were falling out of bounds, shooting from half-court and banking them in," Pitino said. "You've got to give them all the credit in the world."
Pitino spent much of the first half in an unfamiliar pose -- sitting on the bench, watching shot after shot fall and hoping that when the wave ended, his team would still have a chance.
Turns out, the Cardinals did.
"That's the beauty of this game -- expect the unexpected," John Beilein said.
Louisville pulled within arm's distance many times in the second half, but on every occasion, Johannes Herber or Kevin Pittsnogle (six 3-pointers, 25 points) made 3s to keep the Mountaineers ahead.
Not until O'Bannon, the region's most valuable player, slithered through the defense and made a layup with 38 seconds left did Louisville tie it at 77 -- the first tie since 3-all. And not until overtime began did West Virginia finally start missing.
"I wouldn't say we were worn out," Pittsnogle said. "We still had a lot of gas left. We just couldn't make the key plays when we had to make them."
Led by Dean's seventh 3-pointer and four free throws by O'Bannon, the Cardinals opened it up in overtime.
When the buzzer sounded, Pitino started hugging players, and O'Bannon chucked the ball toward the ceiling at The Pit, which hosted a game almost as exciting as the 1983 final when Jim Valvano and North Carolina State won their improbable championship.
"Just to come out and accomplish something ... of this magnitude just makes it that much sweeter," O'Bannon said.
Louisville made its eighth Final Four despite playing the final 4:02 of regulation and overtime without arguably its best player, Francisco Garcia, who couldn't avoid the fouls as the Cardinals started trapping, pressing, doing whatever they could to disrupt the torrid Mountaineers.
The Cardinals made it back to the Final Four for the first time since 1986, when Denny Crum and Pervis Ellison led them to their second national title.
Now, it's Pitino trying to bring his second national championship back to the Bluegrass -- but this time to Louisville, not Kentucky.
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