"You declared it at 7:32 to go, first half," Nantz said to Packer when the Jayhawks had finally pulled away from North Carolina for good. "It shocked me."
"Well," Packer answered, "you say what you see, you know?"
But that's the rub. What you see is only what's happening now, and that might not mean much in a few minutes. It's a hard lesson to learn, though you'd think that someone who's been watching the mercurial sport of college basketball for as long as Packer would have learned it by now.
"That's why I love you," Nantz said, a comment that hung there, achingly, longingly, in the San Antonio air.
So now we turn to the NCAA Championship Game Monday night, Kansas against Memphis, the Tigers having blown out UCLA 78-63. That one had almost none of the crazy drama of the Kansas-Carolina game. The Bruins only stayed as close as they did for as long as they did because the Tigers missed so many shots from close to the basket. I counted 10 misses from within eight feet or so in a first half that ended with Memphis leading by three.
Memphis took care of things in the second half, the excellent guard tandem of Derrick Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts controlling the game and the more pedestrian frontcourt players neutralizing UCLA center Kevin Love.
Both teams are playing tremendously well, Kansas' near stumble against Davidson notwithstanding. That was then, this is now, you see.
They're fairly similar. Both teams use three guards and both like to force turnovers and run. The Memphis backcourt is bigger than just about anybody else's, including that of Kansas. Douglas-Roberts, at 6-7, is a matchup nightmare, and even if someone manages to guard him, he has about a million ways to score. Rose has been unstoppable driving to the basket.
Where Kansas has the advantage is up front, where the Jayhawks have a lot of depth. If Kansas can get Joey Dorsey and Robert Dozier in foul trouble, there's a big dropoff for the Tigers. It's a great plan. It's just that it hasn't worked yet.
The title game promises to be exciting, fast-paced, end-to-end ball, but then both semifinals promised games like that, and while the pace was fast, neither was evenly matched -- the Kansas-North Carolina game, even when the score was close, was always being dominated by one team or the other.
The game will probably come down to which team can sustain a hot streak longer. Kansas is going to have all kinds of trouble with Memphis' dribble-drive penetration, and Memphis is going to have trouble if Rush and Mario Chalmers heat up from outside, or if the Jayhawks can get the ball into the low post. If we're lucky, all of the above.
And if we're smart, we won't convince ourselves in the first half that the way it's going is the way it's going to keep going.
I've learned my lesson. I can't picture the Tigers losing with the way they've been playing, but I picked Kansas to win it all two weeks ago and I'm sticking with the Jayhawks now.
How can they lose: Did you see those last five minutes against North Carolina?
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About the writer
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com or visit his Facebook page.
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