Even though it's been a few weeks since Miami's seemingly impossible win over Akron in the Mid-American Conference Championship game, those last seconds are still replayed over and over again in the minds of any RedHawk fan.
It was the evening of March 10, and as most Miami students migrated south to sunnier skies, I - the sports degenerate - stood in the concourse of Cady Arena with my eyes glued to ESPN.
I had dipped away from the Miami hockey game, joining a small crowd that had gathered in front of the TV to witness the fate of an entire season of Miami basketball encapsulated in a mere 6.6 seconds.
I couldn't help but shake my head and laugh. How do so many Miami games follow the same predictable script, in which the first 39 minutes of regulation are rendered insignificant and the game inevitably boils down to a final possession, a final shot or all-too-often, a Doug Penno 3-pointer?
I like to call it playing the Penno Powerball. Get out your tickets and hope the ball bounces your way.
In the fleeting, frantic final seconds that carried such enormous consequence, I imagine the only thought that registered in Penno's mind was to get the ball to the rim - don't let the most important shot of your career be an air ball.
Penno rose with great vigor and heaved a high-arching, fade-away prayer of a shot toward the cylinder 25 feet away. Two teams and a national audience watched with mouths agape as the ball took a course toward two entirely different possible fates.
Penno watched. The senior and former walk-on, had resurrected his career in recent months with a string of game-winning shots. But early in the season and in seasons past, Penno has been little more than a one-trick pony (134 out of 149 shots this season were 3-pointers). He thought his senior-season heroics would be the swan song of his Miami career. But with this final desperation fling, he was throwing all his chips into the pot. Of the thousands of 3-pointers he'd shot in his lifetime, this is the one on which his legacy rested.
Nathan Peavy watched. On the biggest stage of his career, the senior forward must have thought he had let his team down. In the case of a loss, his seven-point (2-for-9 shooting) effort would be the salient statistic that, in the media's eyes, steered Miami to defeat. Peavy's commendable career was about to end on a sour note, and without an NCAA tournament appearance. That is, unless that ball somehow found net.
Head Coach Charlie Coles watched. As the ball left Penno's hands, the folksy and lovably unrefined coach must have thought that his karmic well had ultimately run dry. Penno's penchant for late-game heroics highlighted Miami's midseason surge and helped mask the stench of the team's 5-10 start. Throughout, Coles was like the Wizard of Oz pulling levers behind a curtain, somehow making his ostensibly better opponents believe that his boys could play at their level. But in peaking behind the curtain, one saw a team that was less talented than Akron and less deserving of an NCAA Tournament ticket.
But alas, such is the beauty of the college basketball playoff system. Only the ball mattered now. The TV camera angle offered a perfect view of the ball's trajectory. And mere milliseconds after Penno released the shot, I noticed the ball veering off course.
"It's off," I thought. And then, "It's way off." And then … Bank.
