Column: Certainly not ‘One Shining Moment’

We would have recounted the moment to our grandchildren 60 years from now, as we watched the NCAA tournament complete with 128 teams. Instead, Duke made me puke.

First off, I don’t like Duke. Jay Williams, Shane Battier and Carlos Boozer broke my heart nine years ago as my Arizona Wildcats, with gun-slinging Gilbert Arenas, fell to Duke in the NCAA tournament finals. I have never forgiven the program.

That being said, though, I am not taking anything away from the Duke team this year. Jon Scheyer, Kyle Singler and Nolan Smith proved that being flashy, trying to make ESPN’s top plays or coming up with arrogant dance moves are not what it takes to win in college basketball. Duke won because it outrebounded every opponent, played solid defense and played smarter than every other team did.

But come on! Another good team played well to win a national championship for a Hall of Fame coach. Hooray!

Six months from now, most of us will not be able to name the last champion. It was an epic game, and I was sitting on the edge of my seat the entire time, but I will quickly move on to the hundreds of other sporting events coming up.

In the next few months, I will be entertained by baseball, the Masters, the NBA and NHL playoffs — and don’t forget about the World Cup.

To quote coach Gordon Bombay, of Mighty Ducks fame, “a quarter of an inch this way and it would have gone in.”

Just as cute little Gordon Bombay fell to the ice after nailing the pipe, missing the chance to win the state championship on a triple deke, Gordon Hayward did everything it took to create an opportunity to win for Butler.

He snatched the rebound from Duke center Brian Zoubek, hustled down the court, received the awesome block by teammate Matt Howard on Singler and got the shot off over Smith. The ball was soaring through the air with the hopes of every American heart — minus those of Duke fans — under its wings.The ball hit off the glass only to rim out, as America yelled at the television, stomped on the ground or hit the table with both fists.

My friends and I sat disgruntled, staring at the screen. Then CBS thought it would be funny — funnier than trying to see how many times they could say “horizon” in a clever manner, referring to Butler’s conference — to replay the shot over and over again. I thought I was being tortured, as I tried to rip my eyes clear out of their sockets. They wanted to keep reminding us of the awesome moment that could have been. To make matters worse, they put the shot at the end of “One Shining Moment”.

“One Shining Moment” is the traditional music video played at the end of the NCAA tournament that creates a montage of the best moments of the tournament. It showed Ali Farokhmanesh’s three-pointer to knock off Kansas, Danero Thomas’s shocker to send Vanderbilt home, a Villanova fist-pump that seemed rather out of place, and of course Bob Huggins caressing Da’Sean Butler like he was a dying puppy. But then CBS ended my favorite music video (no, seriously, I watched the last eight “One Shining Moment” videos before the championship game) with a dagger to the heart.

Placing the Hayward miss as the culminating moment of the video made sense, to be sure, but was just as painful as CBS constantly trying out new and fun camera angles throughout the tournament. Can someone tell them to stick with the traditional camera angle? There is a reason that every basketball game I can remember has been shot from this view. Argh!

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Christian Laettner’s full-court shot, “The Catch” by Joe Montana and Dwight Clark, Michael Jordon’s shot over Sam Perkins, Team USA’s victory over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympics and Lou Gehrig’s “luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech are sports moments that will never be forgotten. Life-changing, historic moments like these are why we watch sports.

We watch sports for the passion, the emotion, the pride and the tingling sensation of seeing something so awesome happen that you can’t stop thinking of how spectacular that was. We all wanted that on Monday night. We had that on Monday night. It was within reach, but it just teased us instead.

In the movie “Hot Tub Time Machine,” there is a secondary character who is missing his right arm in 2010. The main characters travel back in time to 1986, via hot tub, and he has his arm. Lou, one of the main characters, becomes fascinated with the idea that they might witness a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of watching the guy losing his arm, which would be pretty epic.

Hayward’s shot would have been even more historic than seeing a guy’s arm get taken off.

We were robbed. I feel like a kid that just found out the Easter Bunny wasn’t real, or that Neverland doesn’t exist. I blame Singler’s nasty ginger goatee.

I guess we should just move on and watch Tiger win the Masters.