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March has a reputation for delivering big plays in college basketball. But there has seldom been a play that checked as many boxes of excitement as the one by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball team against Furman University on Monday night in Asheville, N.C.
Consider:
1. It was a 30-plus-foot shot. The senior guard David Jean-Baptiste heaved up a 3 while guarded by two players and with a third opponent a few steps away. The shot swished.
2. It was in overtime. Furman had hit a 3-pointer to send the game to an extra period at the end of regulation.
3. No one called a timeout. Mike Bothwell of Furman had hit a shot with four seconds to play in overtime, but Coach Lamont Paris of Chattanooga did not call a timeout. So the drama continued uninterrupted by teams standing in circles or by TV commercials.
4. Time was expiring. Baptiste’s shot left his hands with roughly half a second left.
5. It was make or break. Chattanooga was down by 2. The shot wasn’t to tie the game, it was to win it. And had it missed, Chattanooga would have lost.
6. It was to make the N.C.A.A. tournament. The shot came in the Southern Conference tournament final. The winner of the game, the tournament champion, qualified for the N.C.A.A. tournament. But the runner-up certainly will not.
7. There was history on the line. Chattanooga had made the tournament only three times this century, so qualifying was a big deal. But poor Furman has waited since 1980 for an N.C.A.A. berth. When its players collapsed to the court, students, alumni, fans and former players had to be collapsing in places like Greenville, S.C.; Atlanta; Charlotte; and anywhere that former Paladins reside.
Chattanooga will probably be around a 13th seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament, and the Mocs will be pretty big underdogs in the first round. No matter how their season turns out, however, they have already won a game that’s a candidate for ending of the year.
