OPINION

by Tim Dahlberg

updated 1:43 a.m. ET April 8, 2008

SAN ANTONIO - The freshman sensation recovered from his gummy bear hangover just in time to take the game over. The guard better known for his defense answered with a shot from nowhere just when all seemed lost for his team.

The missed free throws that were always supposed to doom Memphis finally did. Then Kansas showed that maybe there is something to the idea that having a group of veterans who know how to play together can trump an inexperienced star, no matter how good he is.

And then there was the matter of the 3-pointer that wasn’t.

This was supposed to be a Final Four for the ages before a couple of clunkers were served up in the semifinals. When the confetti rained down in the court Monday night with the crowning of a new national champion, few in the crowd of 43,257 would argue that we at least didn’t get a national championship game for the ages.

The record books will show Kansas won the national title, breaking a 20-year drought with a 75-68 overtime win that was everything a pairing of No. 1-seeded teams was supposed to be. But the score itself won’t convey the drama of a championship game so good that 40 minutes wasn’t enough to settle anything on this night in the Alamodome.

“Unbelievable game,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “Unbelievable finish.”

They believe it in Kansas because Mario Chalmers calmly stepped up and hit the shot of his life, a 3-pointer from the top of the key with 2.1 seconds left that sent a game that seemingly had been lost into overtime.

They will find it hard to believe in Memphis, where the free-throw shooting that coach John Calipari dismissed as simply unimportant turned out to be the only reason Chalmers had a chance to tie the game at all.

Memphis wasn’t going to practice free throws because Calipari either didn’t want his team thinking negative thoughts, or thought they were so good that they wouldn’t need them anyway. Call it arrogance, but the strategy worked all the way up until the final 1:15 of the game, when the two star guards of the Tigers combined to miss four out of five free throws and blow what was almost certainly the school’s first national championship.

“Ten seconds to go, we’re thinking we’re national champs and then a kid makes a shot, and all of a sudden we’re not,” Calipari said.

That Kansas even got that close seemed impossible after Derrick Rose, who a day earlier was sidelined with a stomach ache after eating too many gummy bears, came back from a pedestrian first half to score 11 straight points down the stretch. That gave Memphis what appeared to be an insurmountable lead.

In the year of the freshman in college basketball, it seemed as though Rose would ride off into the NBA as a legend who used his one year in school to win his team a title. But a nine-point lead with just over 2 minutes left evaporated before a frenzied crowd of blue-clad fans.

Credit that to a concept that seems to have been lost among coaches so eager to win quickly that they recruit players they know will jump to the NBA in just a year. Kansas had a veteran core of four players who had played together for three years, and when it mattered the most at the end of the game they never panicked.

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Memphis didn’t panic, either, except when the game was stopped and Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts had to stand all alone at the free throw line. CDR, as his teammates call him, clanged one off the rim with 1:15 left, and missed two more with 16.8 seconds left. But Memphis rebounded the ball, only to have Rose miss the first of two and give Chalmers the chance to be a hero.

“It wasn’t the free throws,” Rose said. “It was the plays before the free throws.”

CDR disagreed.

“I guess you can boil it down to the free throws,” he said.

Even Chalmers’ shot might not have been enough if a 3-pointer by Rose with 4:14 left hadn’t been changed to just a field goal after officials reviewed it on the TV monitor. Rose’s foot was clearly within the line, but the call wasn’t changed until there was a TV timeout.

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“I don’t like this being able to go to the monitor,” Calipari said. “I’m going to try to get that changed.”

In the end, the game wasn’t what it was supposed to be, but more than it should have been. Most expected a 92-88 shootout, but both teams played brutal defense and the game turned into one of hard-fought possessions instead of fast breaks.

By the time it went to the first national title overtime since Arizona beat Kentucky in 1997, Calipari admitted he had overused his star players and Memphis simply had no gas left.

The overtime was anticlimatic, but that didn’t matter to the tens of thousands of Jayhawk fans who filled the huge dome. They had gone two decades without celebrating, and they weren’t going to wait any longer.

For Memphis, the pain of having come so close, may linger just as long.

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