Let me start by saying that this year’s edition of March Madness was a resounding success, and I’m not talking about my bracket.
Don’t know about you, but when I fill out a bracket I go with my head and not my heart, usually ceding the victory to the higher seed, unless it’s an eight against a nine.
In this year’s first round, I had Kentucky blasting Oakland and going deep into the tournament, and so did everybody else not from Rochester, Michigan.
I also had N.C. State losing in the first round, to Texas Tech, thinking the Wolfpack would be out of gas after a magical do-or-die run through the ACC tournament.
Like a whole lot of people, I also loved me some DJ Burns, reminiscent of my childhood hero Charles Barkley, a.k.a. The Round Mound of Rebound, The Bread Truck, The Crisco Kid, The Good Time Blimp and I could go on.
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But I forget about my bracket once the game starts, which is why I don’t bet. If I was a gambling man, I wouldn’t have enjoyed watching Oakland’s Jack Gohlke light up all of Kentucky’s future first round NBA draft picks, or DJ Burns and DJ Horne help lead the Pack to victory.
Oh but I did.
And then I thoroughly enjoyed the overtime game between those two squads, and then N.C. State’s victories over Marquette and Duke.
I also got a kick out of Yale’s bracket-busting win over Auburn, whom a surprising number of people I know picked to win it all, which would have required beating UConn.
Ha ha ha.
Anyway, March was a lot of fun, but then came April, with no more showers of madness.
Was it the worst Final Four ever?
Well, it was close. Each of the three games were decided by double digits: Purdue beat State by 13, UConn beat Alabama by 14, and then UConn beat Purdue by 15.
Ho hum.
I looked at all the scores of past Final Fours and discovered that in the 67 years since the NCAA tournament expanded to four regions and at least 32 teams, all three final four games including the championship and the two semi-final matchups have been settled by double-digit deficits only 11 times, and this year was one of them.
(I’m not counting those ill-conceived third place games which they stopped playing in 1978, because who cares?)
One of those blowout Final Fours wrapped up on March 30, 1981. That’s the day that President Ronald Reagan was shot, but the NCAA decided to play the game after Reagan joked with his wife Nancy that he should have ducked and then in the operating room asked if his surgeon was a Republican.
The surgeon, who was actually a Democrat, replied, “Today, Mr. President, we’re all Republicans.”
That was a long time ago.
In that Final Four, played in Philadelphia, North Carolina beat Virginia and Ralph Sampson by 13 points, then the Tar Heels faced Indiana and Isiah Thomas, who had advanced by beating LSU by 18. The Hoosiers beat UNC 63-50 in the championship game.
The next year, 1982, a certain freshman who’d been cut from his high school varsity team as a sophomore in Wilmington arrived in Chapel Hill, and the Tar Heels emerged victorious from the most competitive Final Four ever, in which the three games were decided by a total of 10 points.
Michael Jordan hit the game winner as UNC edged Georgetown by a single point. In the semi-final games, the Hoyas defeated Louisville by four points and the Tar Heels outscored Houston by five.
The next season, that Houston team would dunk so many times and beat opposing teams so badly they were dubbed Phi Slamma Jamma, and of course would lose in the championship game to N.C. State on a miraculous Dereck Whittenburg shot/pass to a slam-dunking Lorenzo Charles.
This season, State fans were hoping that four decades later this version of the Wolfpack would rekindle the same do-or-die magic, and for nine wonderful games, it did.
Then March ended, and April brought with it a rare boring and blowout-filled Final Four.
But longtime Carolina fans know about these.
The 2001 Final Four was boring to everybody but fans of Duke, which throttled Maryland and Arizona to win the title.
And North Carolina earned invitations to more than a third of the most lopsided Final Fours of all time.
In addition to its 1981 loss, the Tar Heels fell hard to the red-hot Florida Gators in 2000, after decades earlier having the ill fortune of participating in the Final Four in 1967 and 1968, when John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins were in the middle of winning an unbelievable 10 Final Fours in 12 seasons.
The only team to beat UCLA in the Final Four during that stretch would be N.C. State in 1974, led by David Thompson, college basketball’s first true dunking machine.
For the Tar Heels in the Final Four, it’s truly been the best of times and the worst of times.
UNC played in the three tightest Final Fours of all time, including the aforementioned 1982 tournament that ended with the victory over Georgetown. The other two, each with a total margin of 11 points, came in 1977, when UNC nipped UNLV by a point and then lost to Marquette in the finals, and then in 2017, when UNC nipped Oregon by a point and then beat Gonzaga by six in the finals.
Which kind of proves the point I made several weeks ago, when I said that you can’t talk about the highlights of the NCAA tournament or the Final Four without frequently mentioning teams from the great state of North Carolina.
And thank God for women’s college basketball, which this season was often more compelling than the men’s game. It was fitting that both N.C. State’s men’s and women’s team made their respective Final Fours.
Here’s to even more madness next season, plus some in early April too.
Dimon Kendrick-Holmes is North Carolina editor for Lee Enterprises. Email him at dimon.kendrick-holmes@greensboro.com.