It's Odd How Even They Are

MINNEAPOLIS

They all come down to make or miss, to kiss or cry. That's what this March is made of: three-point shots at the buzzer, making a shot while falling down, losing your grip, and then the game, on an inbounds pass. It's not madness, it's insanity. Anything less than overtime is almost a disappointment in this NCAA tournament. No lead is safe, no deficit too big to overcome. Nothing is secure and everything is in doubt.

In Georgetown's case, it came down to Darrel Owens missing a three-point shot Friday night after his defender, Corey Brewer, had slipped to the floor. Owens was left wide open for what could have been Georgetown's game-winning basket. Owens had to take the shot. He was in three-point territory, the game in his hands, with less than 10 seconds remaining.

He had to shoot it. He had made a three-pointer three minutes earlier to tie the game and start the final frantic minutes that have become characteristic of this tournament. Owens is a senior who had lived through a couple of down years at Georgetown and he had an opening. Of the available options at that moment, I'd take Owens shooting that shot again.

Even Brewer said, "When I tripped . . . in my mind I see the guy hit the three . . . and my heart was in my mouth."

But the shot bounced off the back of the rim. Florida grabbed the rebound and made a pair of free throws, and Georgetown was done. What looked earlier in the night to be a Sunday afternoon date with Villanova for a spot in the Final Four was called off. The kid who dreamed of going to Georgetown, Joakim Noah, will be taking that date instead, but with the Florida Gators, a 57-53 winner in this regional semifinal.

There seems to be a script for the games this March. Somebody jumps out to the lead, the trailing team comes back to claim it back and the rest of the way is all push and pull. One possession is the difference in the outcome. The lead changed hands in Georgetown-Florida four times in the final 2 minutes 39 seconds. But the final time, with 27.5 seconds left, came when Brewer heaved the ball toward the basket while he was falling after either being fouled (the referee's view) or tied up (Brandon Bowman's view) for what could have been a jump ball.

Owens's three-pointer would have put Georgetown in the lead with seven seconds left, but the Hoyas never could find their touch from three-point range. They missed 16 of 21 three-point tries, which really was the story of the game. Georgetown ran beautiful plays to produce good shots but couldn't make enough of them, and failed to reach what would have been the school's first trip to the round of eight since Allen Iverson led the Hoyas there in 1996.

Many of us thought Georgetown was a year away from a big-time tournament run, but there was nothing about Florida that suggested the Hoyas shouldn't have advanced one more round. Then again, because Florida is more athletic than most of the power-conference teams in the tournament, the Gators had to be feeling the same way about getting past Georgetown.

They're pretty much all even, the teams left in the field now. There's little, if any, difference between Georgetown and Florida or George Mason and Connecticut, which by all rights should have been eliminated Friday night. Almost every game -- George Mason over Wichita State was an exception -- comes down to hitting the shot Owens had or making free throws, or something even more bizarre, like a Washington player committing a stupid foul with his team leading the Huskies by four points.

The disappointment for the losers in this tournament is that they have to feel more than ever that they should still be playing, because nobody is any better than anybody else.

There certainly is nothing to scare Florida into thinking Villanova can't be had on Sunday in the regional final. As close as it was, no way the Georgetown-Florida game could match Villanova-Boston College for dramatic value. The Eagles couldn't hold a 16-point first-half lead even though Randy Foye (29 points) was the only Villanova player to reach double figures and Allan Ray missed 12 of 15 shots. The Wildcats also shot 35 percent to the Eagles' 46.9. But the Wildcats grabbed 15 offensive rebounds, again using quickness to defeat size, and made 14 of 20 foul shots while Boston College missed 9 of 17.

You can go for years now in March and not see true big men matched against each other, which is why it was like watching dinosaurs go at it when Georgetown's 7-foot-2 Roy Hibbert and Florida's 6-11 Noah throw down monster dunks in traffic on back-to-back possessions. Noah and Hibbert had almost exact stats those first 20 minutes. Each made 3 of 4 shots for six points. Hibbert had five rebounds and two blocked shots to Noah's four rebounds and one blocked shot, a block that he converted into a dunk at the other end.

When Noah blocked Hibbert's short shot, then switched over to block Jeff Green's offensive rebound attempt, and then scored at the other end on a quick post-up move, it gave Florida a 33-30 lead early in the second half and seemed to send Georgetown into a panic. Suddenly, the Hoyas couldn't catch, couldn't pass, couldn't stop committing one silly turnover after another. When Al Horford scored on a jump hook over Hibbert to push the Florida lead to 35-30, Coach John Thompson III quickly called time out with 11:24 left because he could see the game slipping away from his team, which should have taken control back at 21-12 before cold shooting and a couple of bad passes betrayed Georgetown.

But tight games are mostly what this tournament has had to offer, from the opening round when Northwestern State beat Iowa to Thursday night's doubleheader featuring UCLA and Texas winning at the buzzer, to Villanova's overtime victory over Boston College.

And the same kind of back-and-forth is what Georgetown and Florida produced, too, from Noah's four minutes of dominance at both ends to Hibbert exerting himself for several possessions to get Georgetown even. When Florida's Taurean Green and Georgetown's Owens traded three-point baskets with less than four minutes to play in a dead-even game, it was fairly easy to see the Gators and Hoyas had fallen into the same delicious pattern.

It's a pattern that has made the first three rounds of this tournament probably as entertaining and as suspenseful as the first three rounds of just about any tournament ever.