It’s a Final Four with a Big One, but the Other Three will take their shots

DETROIT — Brackets can be rascals, of course. They can arrange semifinals as if they have no regard whatsoever for reality, with one semi looking like an undercard and the other like the real final. It happens in tennis now and again. It happens in the NFL now and then. It happens in Final Fours.

It didn’t happen with this men’s Final Four.

With Connecticut (35-3) vs. Alabama (25-11) and Purdue (33-4) vs. North Carolina State (26-14), even rational people can dream of a colossus of a closing Monday night between two forces visible above the land all winter and early spring: the Huskies, aiming for the first repeat championship since Florida in 2006-07, and the Boilermakers, aiming for their own unprecedented Everest.

That’s all while any final that would include North Carolina State’s large and mighty DJ Burns Jr. would, of course, promise ample delight.

“I was raised in a happy environment,” Burns told reporters in Dallas on Sunday after the astonishing Wolfpack felled Duke for the second time in their three meetings in a long, long March. “I try to take that with me everywhere I go.”

He’s taking it to Greater Phoenix, where in a way he’s a mountainous representative of something called “the field,” a presence throughout this March. People of sound mind and good knowledge branded this NCAA tournament as Connecticut vs. “the field.” Could “the field,” once 67 strong, then 31, then 15, then seven, now three, stop the Huskies?

As Connecticut blasted through Stetson by 39, Northwestern by 17 after grabbing that helpful early 36-14 lead, San Diego State by 30 and Illinois by 25 with that eternal 30-0 run from 23-23 to 53-23, the reviews piled in.

“You think you’re open, but you’re not,” Stetson Coach Donnie Jones said of Connecticut’s defense and physicality.

“They have got five guys who can all score,” Northwestern Coach Chris Collins said of the futility of probing film for weak links.

“They’re connected. They’re dangerous,” said San Diego State Coach Brian Dutcher, whose 2023 team played Connecticut in the national final.

“And then they do what they do,” Illinois Coach Brad Underwood said, referring to the 30-0.

They do what they do even though they’re doing it with merely three of the guys who played double-digit minutes during the championship game last April. The passes sing and the numbers sing arias, from their assist-to-turnover ratio in the tournament (80-36) to the rebounding advantage (173-125) to all-American Tristen Newton’s assists-to-turnovers (27-7) and more.

They have found that thing Purdue has found, and it’s more than the big men, Connecticut’s Donovan Clingan and Purdue’s Zach Edey, or the smaller men whose excellence leaves room for the big men. It’s that thing Purdue Coach Matt Painter described as he reached the Final Four at last in his 19th season of being very, very good.

“I think we fall into the trap of looking at talent,” Painter said of recruiting, “instead of looking at talented people that are productive. The production is what we go on, right? You’re like, ‘Hey, man, this guy can jump over the moon and do a whirlybird 360,’ but he gets two rebounds. Who cares, then? How many breakaways are you going to get, right? You’ve got to get guys — like, if you look at UConn and look at those guys on their team, they are competitive, and they’re nasty, and they can guard, and what they’re all about, they’re all about winning. He’s done a great job” — Coach Dan Hurley — “instilling that, but I bet, if you went and talked to him, he would talk about [how] they were that way before. He’s just enhanced that stuff and been able to get it.”

“Our defense is elite,” Hurley told reporters in Boston after Connecticut mangled Illinois. “Our offense is elite. We rebound the ball. These guys play every possession like it’s the end of the world.” He raved about assistants Kimani Young and Luke Murray preparing players. And so: “We’re going to be tough to beat.”

Even so, it will qualify as sumptuous if Edey and friends, after Edey’s tournament points-rebounds totals of 30-21, 23-14, 27-14 and 40-16, get to try.

Then again, they might not. Who would guess that Alabama, one year after a role as No. 1 overall seed and a gross mismanagement of a tragedy involving players, would transform its 6-5 season of early January with a speech from the Alabama softball coach (Patrick Murphy) about the ancient Dharmic concept of “mudita” (reveling in the well-being of others)?

“Mudita, ever since we first heard of it when conference play started, it really stuck with us and really changed our season around,” second-team all-American Mark Sears told reporters in Los Angeles, concluding, “It really helped us win this Final Four [berth] because of mudita.”

And who in the mad world, inside Raleigh or out, would have imagined the nine-game streak hauling North Carolina State from forgotten beneath the masses of conference tournament brackets — and surely not getting an NCAA bid — to bringing Burns’s aura and essence to the Final Four? Would you have guessed it in the outset of the ACC tournament in Washington, in the lightly attended game between 10th- and 15th-place teams, when the Wolfpack stood tied 75-75 with lowly Louisville with 4:50 left? Would you have guessed it when it trailed seventh-place Syracuse 37-35 early in the second half?

What about the ACC quarterfinal when fourth-place Duke pulled within 50-48 with 11:47 left? That was doom, right? Or the graphic semifinal with third-place Virginia, never to elude hoop memories, when the Wolfpack trailed 58-52 with 45 seconds left, or when Virginia’s 85% foul shooter missed with five seconds left, and N.C. State’s Michael O’Connell ran down and launched that tying three? Or when it trailed first-place North Carolina 40-39 at the half in what seemed close to formality?

Would anyone think it during tight second halves with Texas Tech and excellent Oakland, the latter so tight it found overtime? Would anyone imagine that by the time it got to No. 2 seed Marquette and No. 4 seed Duke (again), it would look sort of unbeatable? Or that it would manage to pull off the statistical lunacy of 26% shooting in the first half against Duke followed by 73 in the second? Or that it would emblematize these transfer portal days when O’Connell said to reporters in Dallas, “I think it’s pretty cool that none of us played together last year”?

It’s beyond belief, and it calls to mind something about those rascal brackets. Many a Final Four year has seen the heavier semifinal become ratified as the real final, including the examples of 1974, 1996, 2002, 2004 and 2018. But there are those years when the hot force that escapes the “undercard” winds up escaping the whole thing with a trophy.

One would be 1985, with Villanova’s famed upset of Georgetown. And another would be 1983, when Houston and Louisville played a dazzling, soaring semifinal, but the season ended with Coach Jim Valvano — well, here’s how he told it to Tony Kornheiser in an eternal feature from that spring: “I know it’s on national TV, and I have this thought that CBS will run this in slo-mo over and over for 100 years, me running over to Dereck [Whittenburg] and us hugging. So I run to Dereck — and he’s hugging somebody else. Unbelievable. The cameras are running. And I’ve got nobody to hug. Live TV, and I’ve got nobody to hug. I grabbed a Houston fan and tried to hug him. Somebody. Anybody. I’m running around looking for somebody to hug.”

Even 41 years on, everybody knows which program Valvano coached.