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IN MY OPINION / TOM SORENSEN
Wildcats one shot away
Heartbreaker: Davidson falls just short of upsetting Kansas
TOM SORENSEN
DETROIT --
Sixteen seconds remain.The yellow block letters on the blue scoreboard say: DAVIDSON 57, KANSAS 59.
The ball is in the hands of the best player in college basketball the past 11 days, Davidson's Stephen Curry.
If you're a fan of the Wildcats and underdogs and student athletes and potentially happy endings and, oops, potentially devastating losses and tension like you can't stand, these 16 seconds are for you.
Kansas is an elite basketball program; the first job out of school for many of its players is in the NBA.
Davidson is a small college with 1,700 students and with a high graduation rate. To be here, on this basketball court in the middle of a football stadium in front of more than 57,000 fans Sunday, the Wildcats had to beat two basketball powers and win three games.
Now they are a victory away from legend. If they beat the Jayhawks, they advance to the Final Four in San Antonio, Texas. The play they use to try to get there is called Flat.
The unhurried Curry, a sophomore who will someday look old enough to drive, works his way left around a pick set by teammate Thomas Sander. He goes right, puts on a little fake and prepares to take the shot that will win the game. But Brandon Rush, 4 inches taller at 6-6 and unbearably long armed, leaps in front of him.
Another defender waits on the ground. Curry is surrounded. Time is tight. So he passes to point guard Jason Richards and Richards has to shoot and he misses and that's it.
"Why is the horn going off?" Kansas coach Bill Self asks.
The ending is too abrupt. As heavily favored as Kansas is, nobody, not even Self, expects the best story in sports to simply end.
Curry claps once, looks at the floor and walks to the end of court, in front of the Davidson fans, hands on his knees and jersey in his mouth.
"We were so close to the Final Four," he says later. "And we came so close to building on the story we built in the tournament and all year. One shot and ..."
As the players talk in soft monotones, somebody delivers to the locker room 12 deep dish pizzas. The Wildcats are college students again.
The beauty of this team is that they always were. They don't live in athletic dorms; they never stopped being part of the school they represent. What great emissaries they were, confident yet humble, disciplined but full of humor.
They were strangers to almost everybody outside greater Charlotte when the tournament began. Now there are odes being written about Charlotte's Curry, Chicago's Richards, Cincinnati's Sander, Nigeria's Andrew Lovedale and the unlikeliest of Sunday's stars, Bryant Barr from Falmouth, Maine.
Their fans were as good as they were. Kansas is a school with almost 30,000 students and a basketball tradition handed from generation to generation like an heirloom. And the singing, shouting Davidson fans made so much noise it was as if fans of the Jayhawks asked permission to cheer.
Permission denied.
Sander, a senior, is distraught as he walks off the court after his final game. But before he goes, he points to the Davidson fans.
"It's just incredible," he says. "We're a school of 1,700 and look at how many fans we had. This will never happen again.
"Unless we do it."
