Do you think Christian Laettner was watching?
His shot from 1992 hasn’t gone anywhere. It still lives forever in March, only now it has company. The Elite Eight fates giveth to Duke, and they taketh away.
Inexplicable. Incredible. Unfathomable. Anything else to say about the Braylon Mullins shot for Connecticut that brought down the Blue Devils Sunday?
“I don’t have the words,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said afterward. “I don’t have the words.”
No wonder. His team had played through various pains and hardships and for most of the day it looked as if such resolve would pay off in a big way. Until it didn’t. That’s how something dramatic becomes a genuine shocker, when things happen that nobody could make up.
“Obviously that's an epic,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said.
And then some. Here are seven reasons why.
1 — Mullins had missed all four of his 3-point attempts Sunday before he broke Duke’s heart. His team had missed 17 of its first 18. “I kept asking the assistant coaches, and no one would tell me what it was,” Hurley said of that horrendous beginning. "I knew it was bad.”
There’s more. Mullins was 4-for-23 in the NCAA tournament, including an ugly 0-for-8 against Furman. Since the end of February, he was 10-for-57 from behind the arc. That’s a sub-Arctic 17.5 percent.
But he’s shooting 100 percent in Duke-killers.
2 — The game-winner that will hang in the inner sanctum of March moments came from a 19-year-old freshman.
OK, freshmen heroics have become the norm this season. The star freshman on the other team had 27 points, eight rebounds and four assists Sunday. Cameron Boozer’s handiwork. But still. This time last year, Mullins was scoring 38 points in Greenfield Central’s double overtime loss in the Indiana high school tournament.
Now he’s knocking off the No. 1-ranked team in the country, the bluest of the bluebloods, and carrying his team to the Final Four? Well, yes.
3 — Others had to help make it even possible.
After a Huskies’ steal, Hurley could have called a timeout and set up something. It probably wouldn’t have been Mullins shooting one up from Maryland.
“You're torn right there...it's instincts,” Hurley said. “It's gut instinct. But I think with their size, their length, their ability to switch everything, it just felt like the window where you've just got to let March Madness take over, March Magic.”
The ball was actually in the hands of Alex Karaban, who has played in a gazillion NCAA tournament victories for Connecticut. So what happens? The senior who has seen it all passes to the freshman who hasn’t.
“When I saw Braylon, and for some reason I had the gut instinct to pass it to him,” Karaban said. “I looked at the rim, and there was five seconds left, and I thought maybe something better could develop. I had Cam Boozer in front of me, which was a harder, more difficult shot, so I passed it to Braylon. When I saw him release it, I was like, that really might go in.”
In other words, a lot of UConn gut instinct by guys who have been around was crammed into those last seconds, allowing Mullins the chance to be the biggest name in the state of Connecticut Sunday night.
“I had the ball, and I know AK had just hit one,” Mullins said. “So I threw him...and he just threw the ball back to me, and I knew I had to put one up.”
4 — Lucas Oil Stadium, where Mullins and his teammates will be facing Illinois Saturday, is 26 miles from his high school gym. He delivered a shot from another zip code so he could play the Final Four near his hometown.
“It went in, and the Indiana kid sent us to Indianapolis,” Karaban said in the post-game press conference. “Like that one? I've been using it a lot lately.”
5 — It took Duke’s eighth turnover in the last 18 minutes to make all this happen. If the Blue Devils only make seven in the second half — still a dangerously high number for such an important occasion — Mullins never has the chance to put a stake through their hearts.
Duke led for 38 minutes and 28 seconds. The Blue Devils trailed for just over 51 seconds. And only the last 0.4. Just enough to haunt them for a good long time.
6 — There is the Duke habit that has become too conspicuous and painful to miss. The Blue Devils won 35 games this season and lost only three. The defeats came by letting a 17-point lead get away against Texas Tech, a 13-point lead vanish against North Carolina and Sunday’s coup de March Madness. They were up 19 on UConn. They also lost in the Final Four last season after leading Houston by 14.
All that has turned disappointment into utter anguish.
This tied for the third-largest comeback in the Elite Eight or later in NCAA tournament history. According to ESPN, No. 1 seeds had been 134-0 in the tournament when ahead by at least 15 points at halftime. Duke had been 27-0. Now it’s 27-1, and it’ll take a while in Durham for them to get over the 1.
7 — And finally, Duke NCAA tournament nightmare, thy name is UConn.
It wasn’t just this. In the 2004 Final Four, the Blue Devils led the Huskies by eight points inside of four minutes, but UConn went on a 12-0 run to win 79-78. In 1999, Duke carried a 37-1 record into the national championship game and had every reason to expect another Mike Krzyzewski title.
Until UConn beat the Blue Devils 77-74.
That’s a lot of March Madness torment from one opponent. Especially this last one, a gut-punch for the ages.
The 1992 Kentucky Wildcats probably don’t feel a lot of sympathy.
