The Melting Point
I don't know whether it's just an NCAA men's basketball finals thing, or if it extends to other sports (I'm sure it doe), but I've noticed for many years that there's this moment when you can tell a team is suddenly melting down. I saw it many years ago after we drove 17 hours from Palo Alto to Seattle to see Duke play Seton Hall in the national semifinals. Duke was favored and had a big lead when one of their players Robert Brickey went down with an injury. Duke melted immediately. Seton Hall routed them.
Sometimes it happens right before the end of a game, as it famously did in 1982, when Fred Brown of Georgetown passed the ball to James Worthy, giving the national championship to Carolina. It went Carolina's way again years later when Chris Webber of Michigan called for a time out when there were none left, turning the ball over and the game with it.
And it happend yesterday when Carolina was up by about 10 and Georgetown scored an easy layup off a back-door pass. I said to The Kid, "Georgetown is going to win this. Carolina has just begun to melt down. You can see it." And they did. It was awful. Carolina would have been lucky to have lost in regulation; but the game went into overtime, which was five minutes of straight hell for the Tar Heels. Georgetown scored at will while Carolina took one desperate doomed shot after anther. When Tyler Hansbrough went to the line for two foul shots near the end of the bonus period, I told the kid "He'll miss them both. Watch." Bear in mind that Hansbrough hadn't missed a foul shot for the whole game up to that point. He'd hit something like ten in a row. But he clanged the last two. It must have pained Roy Williams to look at the faces of his kids and know there wasn't a damn thing that could be done. They looked like This Can't Be Happening, which is the worst look in the world for a team like that to have at a time like this. You've got to go calm and find deep reserves of Resolve and other stuff like that. They didn't have it. Georgetown did.
Gotta like Georgetown. Impressive team.
[Later...] I see Hansbrough quoted in the paper this morning saying the problem was that the team's shots "just didn't fall". Well, yeah. But Basketball is a game of psychology as well as skill. Georgetown got into the Tar Heel's heads enough so you knew the Heels were going to lose, long before it happened. So did the Heels. And so did the Hoyas.