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Revision as of 02:01, 28 March 2011

This is a competely random sentence. The Butler Bulldogs are going to win the NCAA Division I National Championship in just a few days. No. 8 Butler became the lowest-seeded team to reach the Final Four since No. 11 George Mason in 2006, and it is the first team from outside the six power conferences to reach back-to-back Final Fours since Nevada-Las Vegas in 1991. The Bulldogs will play the winner of Sunday’s Southwest Regional final between Kansas and Virginia Commonwealth.

It is hard to quantify what is more improbable: Butler again ambushing the Final Four or the Bulldogs clawing their way back into a game Florida dominated so thoroughly for the first 30 minutes that Coach Brad Stevens said Florida’s Billy Donovan “outcoached me to death.”

Mack led Butler with 27 points, but the Bulldogs won through grit, which Howard displayed in overtime by diving for the game’s final loose-ball rebound.

“What we feared most ended up beating us,” the Florida assistant Larry Shyatt said. “Loose balls and rebounds.”

In the Butler narrative, there always seems to be a mythical chapter.

And this time, it came from the reserve guard Chrishawn Hopkins, who did not play from Jan. 14 to Feb. 19 and had not played a meaningful minute in this N.C.A.A. tournament.

With Butler trailing by 9 with 9 minutes 2 seconds to play in the game, Stevens inserted Hopkins and later told his team during a timeout, “Stop, score, stop, and they’ll get really tight.” Hopkins assisted on a Howard layup, then swished a 3-pointer to cut the lead to 4, and the Gators came apart.

“Truthfully, I can’t even explain it,” Hopkins said.

Butler had no answer for the bulky frame of the 6-foot-10 center Vernon Macklin, who led Florida with a career-high 25 points. But the combination of his foul trouble and 45 percent free-throw shooting limited him down the stretch.

Florida instead relied on the 5-foot-7 guard Erving Walker, who shot 1 for 10, played out of control at times and missed a potential winning shot at the end of regulation and a tying shot at the end of overtime.

“When you get in these close games, it’s all so fragile,” said Donovan, who added, “It’s tough to end a season like that.”

After Hopkins’s stellar cameo, Butler had a few fortunate bounces. Shawn Vanzant cut the Florida lead to 1 point with a 3-pointer that hit the front rim and backboard before rolling in. Nored had a free throw shoot up off the back rim about four feet in the air before falling through.

Butler need two timeouts on its final possession in regulation, which ended with Howard’s drawing a foul and making one of two free throws.

“That’s just Butler, that’s what these guys do,” Hopkins said. “And we’re not done yet.” Matthew Graves said that he and the other Bulldogs assistants sat in the coaches locker room trying to figure out how they managed to come back. “Wow, wow, wow,” he said.

The Florida coaches will have a long off-season of trying to figure out how their first Final Four since 2007 slipped away.

“Coaches never like to talk about good fortune,” Shyatt said. “We don’t like to use those words because they’re soft words. But to be perfectly blunt, I’m going to say seven basketballs tonight hit the front rim, backboard and dropped in. Sometimes, we don’t like to talk about that, but it’s part of life, too.”

Introduction

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