WASHINGTON — A few years from now, someone will ask you who won the 2015 NCAA Tournament. You’ll think for a minute, furrow your brow, cock your head to the side as you rack your brain for the answer. Surely you watched that game, right? Who could it have been?
Of course, this wasn’t supposed to be the story.
Monday night’s National Championship game was supposed to be either an affirmation of what we’d been told to expect all season and the resulting coronation of an undefeated Kentucky, or the exposing of a clothesless Emperor Calipari. Wisconsin deprived us of that on Saturday night, instead giving us the tournament’s enduring battle a game early. Years from now, nobody will remember that Duke won the final — only that Wisconsin ended Kentucky’s shot at perfection two days earlier.
The stories all season and tournament long revolved around Kentucky coach John Calipari, centering on how his recruiting machine had optimized the one-and-done system to provide a never-ending parade of McDonald’s All-Americans primed for National Championships. But for the second straight year, that uber-team was undone by a senior-heavy club, much the same way it was stunned by Kevin Ollie’s UConn squad in the 2014 title game.
The fact that a freshmen-led Duke squad actually won the title game simply won’t resonate throughout history the same way as it would have if Kentucky had stormed to a perfect 40-0 season.
Never mind that 60 of Duke’s 68 points were scored by freshmen. Never mind that they have nine McDonald’s All-Americans themselves, and that they’ve had the most of any school since 2000 (33) and since 1990 (48).
The Badgers are hardly the first team to steal the spotlight through an epic game earlier in the dance. Duke did so in a regional final, against Kentucky, no less, when Christian Laettner received a baseball pass from Grant Hill and sunk a turnaround jumper that remains the signature shot of the entire sport. The Fab Five won a pair of overtime thrillers in 1993 (including a national semifinal win over — who else — Kentucky) before eventually losing the championship game to North Carolina.
Arguably, no team made as impressive a run through the field as this year’s Badgers have since Arizona’s shocking run in 1997. After entering that tournament as a four-seed, the Wildcats beat a pair of double-digit seeds before squaring off with top seed Kansas in the Sweet 16. They knocked off the Jayhawks, then ousted surprising 10-seed Providence to go to the Final Four, also in Indianapolis, the site of this year’s championship. Once there, they knocked off two more top seeds, North Carolina and — yes — Kentucky to win the title.
While Wisconsin finished the season third in Ken Pomeroy’s overall ratings, the Badgers knocked off second-ranked Arizona in the Regional Final, top-ranked Kentucky in the national semifinal, then faced fourth-ranked Duke in the title game. They also toppled the 12th-ranked North Carolina Tar Heels back in the Sweet 16, the highest-rated four-seed in the field.
Duke faced some tough teams as well, beating underrated Utah and Gonzaga squads that were both better than the Michigan State team they drew in the other national semifinal. But they didn’t have to beat another one seed, and they didn’t have to beat Kentucky.
That’s the real shame of it. Duke sneaked into the third overall one-seed of the tournament, avoiding Kentucky’s half of the bracket. They did so despite not winning either the ACC regular-season title or ACC Tournament, to become the first team to ever fail to do either and still earn a top seed. And they earned the seed above Wisconsin, leading to the setup of this year’s Final Four.
Sadly, Monday night’s game will be largely forgotten to history, a disappointing anticlimax to Saturday’s stunner. It didn’t help the way the game went down, with Duke magically outshooting Wisconsin 16-3 from the free throw line in the second half. But the Badgers are in no position to complain, not after a number of questionable calls breaking their way down the stretch against Kentucky.
No, we got neither the final we wanted, nor deserved. Kentucky, or whoever beat them, seemed the rightful owner of the crown. Instead, we got Duke. But don’t worry, we’ll all have forgotten in a few years anyway.
