DETROIT — You can be one of the great college basketball players of your era, and never experience a dream moment when you climb a ladder, seemingly to heaven, scissors in hand, and peer down at faces smiling at you and voices shouting for you as you begin to snip a strand of the net that is hanging from a basket that has been waiting four years for you.
Larry Bird, thanks to Magic Johnson, was denied his One Shining Moment. Kobe Bryant never bothered trying for his.
Tyler Hansbrough came back to North Carolina for one last chance to have one forever shining moment.
The last obstacle in his way was this love affair between a driven basketball team from East Lansing and a demoralized, devastated city that had adopted the Michigan State Spartans as a symbolic Ford wagon of hope, if only for 40 more minutes.
So 40 minutes from the top of the ladder and the top of the world, all Hansbrough had to do was beat Michigan State, beat Magic Johnson’s inspirational presence, beat Ford Field, beat Detroit and beat what seemed like the entire state of Michigan.
For these final 40 minutes, Hansbrough and his Tar Heel teammates had no time for sympathy. Not now. If others chose to look at the Spartans and see Cinderella Men, so be it.
This was Carolina Blue, cold-blooded basketball royalty, out to crown the blue-collar team that represented the black-and-blue-collar city with Class of 2009 Hall of Famer Michael Jordan in the house. Ask Patrick Ewing what Jordan’s mentality was like whenever a national championship or NBA championship was on the line.
And North Carolina 89, Michigan State 72 turned out to be UNLV-Duke. Foreman-Frazier. Secretariat-Sham. Bears-Patriots in Super Bowl XX.
Heir Jordans, indeed.
No team had ever scored 55 points in the first half of an NCAA championship game. Not the John Wooden-Lew Alcindor UCLA Bruins, not anyone. No team had led by 21 points at the half. Not the John Wooden-Bill Walton UCLA Bruins. Not anyone.
Every last Tar Heel played defense the way Lawrence Taylor played it in Chapel Hill before he came to the Giants. Wayne Ellington was Jordan, draining rainbow treys. Deon Thompson was a right-handed Sam Perkins in the paint on both ends. A 6-foot-10 freshman named Ed Davis was the young Sam Worthy. Ty Lawson didn’t have to be the Bob Cousy Point Guard Award winner until late.
Hansbrough? He was Hansbrough, which meant doing whatever it takes to win. If Blake Griffin is Alex Rodriguez, then Hansbrough is Derek Jeter.
“This is the best way to go out,” Hansbrough said. “I couldn’t picture it any other way.”
Hansbrough, over the course of four wondrous years, had played every game as if it were his last game. Fans at opposing ACC schools loved to hate the notorious Psycho T, if only because his maniacal relentlessness ran roughshod over their heroes more often than not.
Only now this was his last game. He stood, arms behind his back, wearing his championship hat, and watched One Shining Moment on the overhead scoreboard, and when he stepped down from the podium, I asked him what that was like.
“It’s the best feeling in the world,” he said.
Roy Williams, off to the side, in front of the Carolina blue section, handed Hansbrough the cut-down net and he draped it around his neck, and soon was back on the court dancing with his teammates under the basket.
I asked Jordan, 27 years after he beat Georgetown with a 17-foot J with 17 seconds left — as a freshman — what he would have told the 2009 Tar Heels before the game if he had felt so inclined. “As Coach [Dean Smith] told me that day: ‘Just go out there, have fun,’ ” Jordan said.
Hansbrough will be remembered along Tobacco Road as the basketball Peyton Manning because he stayed. There had been nonsensical suggestions that the outcome of this game would define Hansbrough’s legacy. No worry about that now.
