In Overtime, an All-Timer

ROSEMONT, Ill -- You go into the NCAA tournament praying to see just one game like this, a back-and-forth battle between teams stocked with players as smart as they are talented, a game where somebody gets a big lead and the other guy comes back from an impossible deficit with little time remaining. You dream of seeing one of those all-time classics where the winners are too dazed to make sense of how they persevered and the losers fall to the floor in an agony they never knew could be so painful.

This was such a game. It's a good thing I don't have to tell you the story of Illinois vs. Arizona because I lost my voice with about 38 seconds left in regulation, just like the other 16,957 in this joint who screamed their lungs out when Deron Williams hit a game-tying three-point shot that brought Illinois back from 15 down to 80-80. It's a good thing I can check my notes and the official play-by-play to see how Illinois came back to win, 90-89 in overtime, on the strength of Williams's three-point shooting and final-possession defense, because it wouldn't make sense without confirmation to help reconstruct the miracle victory and the crushing defeat.

Arizona's Jawann McClellan, after being helped from the spot on the court where he sat crying for more than a minute, said: "I really can't explain it. It went by so fast. . . . They hit a lot of three-pointers. . . . I'm not sure how it happened."

Illinois Coach Bruce Weber, once he stopped sobbing, said: "I can't fathom the game. We're sitting there listening to Lute Olson [during his postgame news conference] trying to figure out who made all the baskets. I'm not sure how Deron got the last three-pointer. I know we had a steal in there somewhere."

While Illinois vs. Arizona lacks a signature play, like Duke's Grant Hill throwing deep to Christian Laettner to beat Kentucky, it didn't lack anything else, certainly not effort, intensity, passion, and absolutely not drama. It's way up on the short list of Greatest Comebacks Ever, way up on the short list of Greatest Games Ever. And to think how good it had to be to top Louisville-West Virginia in the prelim! Go ahead, find a better day of basketball.

It has to be the greatest victory in 100 years of Illinois basketball, by far. And it's hard to imagine Arizona has ever suffered a more discouraging defeat. "They're in there right now crying their eyes out," the father of an Arizona player said while Illinois players started to cut down pieces of the net to celebrate their berth in the Final Four.

The game was over, I swear to you, when Arizona was ahead 75-60 with four minutes to play. The Arizona kids had played the game of their lives. They were pounding Illinois. Even while Illinois was fighting back to within single digits, there was never any thought the outcome was in question, not beyond the Illinois bench anyway.

I was in the process of looking up how many games Lute Olson had won in his career, preparing to write a column about how this might have been the sweetest one of all, even with the four combined trips to the Final Four at Iowa, and then Arizona, even with the national championship he won eight years ago. All that was asked of Olson and Arizona was to go halfway across the country and win an NCAA region final against a top-ranked, top-seeded, once-beaten team, in the face of an earsplitting crowd. And he appeared to have done it.

I was preparing to write about how Channing Frye and Hassan Adams, even without much help from the sweet-shooting Salim Stoudamire, had taken it right to Illinois.

And suddenly, while the credits were rolling on Arizona's victory, Illinois flipped the script and provided an ending worthy of the game that led up to it -- unless you're an Arizona fan.

As dramatic as the tournament often is, with all the upsets and buzzer-beating shots that become part of college basketball history, the play is very often -- how do I say this? -- spotty. Games, even between the good teams, are often a matter of attrition. Tournament games have steadily declined in quality for the simple reason that there are fewer and fewer skilled players in college every year.

Maybe that's why hoops junkies had such high hopes for Louisville-West Virginia and Illinois-Arizona.

They're so capable in all the phases of the game, examples of how well teams could play in the 1980s, when teams were chock full of players long on skill and high on basketball IQ.

You have to have both to build a 15-point lead on a team as good as Illinois. And you have to have both to come back from 15 down in a single-elimination circumstance.

Olson and his coaches will rack their brains to figure out how things turned around so quickly. You lose a game like this, you spend forever trying to assess blame, even if you never tell a soul.

But somewhere the blame has to turn into credit, and so much of it has to be awarded to Weber for keeping his team believing, and to Deron Williams (22 points, 10 assists, great defense on Stoudamire the first half), Luther Head (20 points four steals), Roger Powell and Dee Brown.

Every time Illinois needed a steal and a bucket to stop the clock in those final frantic three minutes, Williams, Head and a big kid off the bench named Jack Ingram seemed to come up with one or both. And the partisan crowd, which has been so despondent, began to roar again, that deep desperate guttural sound of a crowd connected to the team and the moment. To the Wildcats' credit, they cut a six-point overtime deficit to one. And they had the final shot, which Adams missed.

And in the bedlam, everybody knew they had seen something not just rare, but admirable, the tournament at its best, March at its absolute Maddest. The band played, the tears flowed. Explanations be damned.