Congratulations, Northwestern. Are you sure you want to be part of this absurdity?
SALT LAKE CITY — Welcome to our annual national perversion, Northwestern. You see now how it works. You might even think your school wise to have stayed out of it the first 77 years.
You spend a Thursday afternoon in a boiling cauldron with a team you haven't seen all year. The lead changes hands six times in the final 96 seconds. The score goes from 61-59 to 62-61 to 63-62 to 64-63 to 65-64 to 66-65 and to 68-66. The witnesses are pretty much hoping to die. The whole thing turns with 17 seconds left on a college student's mistake most normal people can't recognize, then turns again with 14 seconds left on a college student's mistake every nut in Vivint Arena can recognize.
The latter did something so human as having the wrong score in his head as he misread his coach's instruction. That's it. That's all. Now he sits in a locker room devastated to silence, some players covering their faces. Asked whether he thinks more of his 22 flashy points that rescued his team back into contention or his closing mistake when he quickly fouled Northwestern's Bryant McIntosh with 14 seconds left, Vanderbilt's Matthew Fisher-Davis says, “Just the mistake.”
“You can't make a mistake like that,” he says.
Asked if he thought his team trailed by one point instead of the blurry reality of leading by one, he says, “Yeah, I did.”
Recounting the play and his coach's instruction from the sideline, he says, “He said to pick up the point guard, and I took it the wrong way.”
Just a blip after Vanderbilt went ahead 66-65, Fisher-Davis fouled McIntosh, the game's best player and Northwestern's best foul shooter at 86.1 percent, well before McIntosh reached midcourt. Rather than Northwestern conducting an offensive play in the tension, McIntosh just walked to the line. He made both, even if nobody really needs confirmation of that.
From there, Vanderbilt point guard Riley LaChance let fly a three-point shot he is capable of making, but 25-foot three-point shots are fickle, and so this last one bounced high off the rim, took its time staying in the air and wound up out of bounds for a Northwestern possession with one second left.
Northwestern won and felt sorry — for Fisher-Davis.
“Absolutely,” Northwestern forward Gavin Skelly said.
“You kind of feel bad for them,” McIntosh said.
“That was confusing for me,” Skelly said. “I'm a very energetic and emotional guy. So, highs and lows, highs and lows, and they fouled B-Mac with, I think, 15 on the clock. And I was kind of, 'Wait, are we up one?' So I was looking at the score and making sure I felt that we were in the right position. We were down one. I was really confused because, Why would they put our best free throw shooter at the line? But then I realized it was a mistake.”
“When he grabbed me, I was kind of surprised,” McIntosh said.
That's our savage March for you, Northwestern. It always reserves its right to drape athletic competition in outright lunacy. “That's why they call it March Madness,” Skelly said. Guess he must know.
Except for that, he might have spent the remainder of his days wincing every so often because of his own mistake, which he volunteered in conversation. Northwestern Coach Chris Collins sent him in with 26 seconds left for the purpose of switching with McIntosh and onto LaChance. Skelly failed to do it, Skelly said. LaChance went rampaging into the frontier around the basket for a surging layup, and Vanderbilt got its lead with 17 seconds left. “That could have lost us the game,” Skelly said. “So it's a game of mistakes — whoever can make the most mistakes, no, whoever can make the least mistakes.”
It's both of those, yes. Yet as people try to process these things, there's often some other, funky happening, maybe even something to direct the brain away from sympathy for a college student. That, there was. At the 4:06 mark, the 2:30 mark and the 0:26 mark, Vanderbilt fouled and sent Northwestern center Dererk Pardon to the foul line. Normally, this would be prudent. Pardon made 31 of 60 free throws during the 2016-17 season, a tad off his similarly chilly rate of 27-for-51 during the 2015-16 season.
Pardon made — and swished — all six. This made for the curious possibility that Pardon, the maker of Northwestern's most famous shot of the season as the horn sounded against Michigan on March 1, might just be one of those rare human beings who prefers atrocious, stultifying pressure when shooting free throws.
“I do better in those situations,” said the sophomore from Cleveland. “I don't know why. But I think I just do ... I have no clue.”
Thereby did Northwestern, one game into its tournament history, offer one of the tournament's unofficial mottoes: I have no clue. It got 25 points from McIntosh, and the soft shots he produces after his hard drives into the lane are serial beauties. It got a compelling match coming Saturday with No. 1 seed Gonzaga, and the West Region got an arena hallway with a devastated team on one end and McIntosh on the other, saying, “Our heart's still beating.”
It got a whole helping of March, right in its first-ever classroom.