Eamonn Brennan, College Basketball Reporter
Comment
INDIANAPOLIS — They were destined to collide. The basketball gods handed Saturday night’s gift down from on high. The whole idea was too essential to go unrealized. Wisconsin’s story had to end this way: To return to the Final Four. To exorcise those Big Blue demons. To go blow-for-staggering-blow with 38-0. To write a cheesy final act to a sports movie that began 12 short months ago.
That was the idea, anyway, and why not? The stakes, the teams, the players — how could a formulation so perfect come to exist without the invisible nudge of fate?
And then it was real. Then the collision came. Then, after 40 electrifying minutes of live-and-die-with-every-bucket basketball, and after Wisconsin finally prevailed — when it turned 38-0 to 38-1, and stopped history in its tracks — the Badgers proved how wrong we were all along.
Saturday wasn’t an ending. Saturday culminated nothing. Saturday wasn’t even a goal. Saturday’s 71-64 win over the previously unbeaten Wildcats was, truly, just one more game — another necessary, unavoidable step toward the real ending, the actual finish, the one thing Wisconsin wants more than any other: a national title. Nothing less.
Saturday? Just a coincidence.
Ask Nigel Hayes, who played seven forgettable minutes in 2014’s national semifinal. Surely he wanted a chance to show how far he’s come.
“It was not the mindset to try and end their streak,” Nigel Hayes said. “[It was] the fact that we wanted to win a national championship, and they were the team we had to play.”
Ask Frank Kaminsky, who saw his junior season end with one of the worst performances of his season. On Saturday, he took on a far bigger, far deeper, far more devastating UK front line. This time, he was not as an emerging star but the overwhelming choice for national player of the year. This time, he emerged with 20 points and 11 rebounds. Surely he was thinking of last season’s letdown when he prepared for this game. Surely the thought at least crept into his mind.
“It’s great that we had a chance to play a good team along the way and come out on top,” Kaminsky said.
Ask Sam Dekker, the last player to leave the AT&T Stadium court a year ago, the lone Badger left crouching on the court as Kentucky hugged and scrummed, the only one punishing himself with the visual.
“Last year’s game was motivation — not because of Kentucky,” Dekker said. “Because of how far we got.”
Ask Josh Gasser, fifth-year senior, mobbed by microphones at his locker. Come on, man: How great must you feel right now?
“Feeling real good — but, you know, we’re ready for the next game,” Gasser said. “I’m just ready to get out of here, get to bed, and then ready tomorrow to get back to work, because we’ve got a big one coming up.”
See? While the rest of the world — guilty as charged — greeted Saturday’s matchup as a glorious narrative culmination storyline, the Badgers saw it as as little more than a roadblock. Oh, sure, Wisconsin didn’t mind the chance to correct the record against Kentucky, even if that meant playing an unbeaten team wielding the best, most dominant defense in recent memory. But they wouldn’t have been bothered if Notre Dame had finished the job last weekend or if some random double-digit seed pulled a VCU on the entire Midwest region. It wouldn’t have mattered. Everybody else was only one more team in the way.
Call it the confidence of greatness. It was not unfair to ask, as we all did for months, whether anyone really could beat Kentucky. The Wildcats were undefeated, incomprehensibly talented, and deserving of their place at the center of the 2014-15 season’s orbit. They really were great.
Well, so is Wisconsin. In its own right, on its own terms, the Badgers are special.
Brennan: Wisconsin wasn't thinking about UK - ESPN
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