ATLANTA – Maybe you had to be in The Pit to understand just how deep the pain was, how complete the devastation, how agonizing the moment. There are always teardrops that fall in the aftermath of elimination at the NCAA Tournament. There are always bodies scattered throughout a locker room, some racked with sobs, some prone on the floor.

That’s part of the charm of the event, after all. We want to see the winners cutting down nets, sure. But in this championship, more than any other, there is always a direct flip side. You hardly ever see such raw emotions in a losing World Series clubhouse, or a losing Super Bowl locker room.

But exactly one year ago this weekend, you saw it all on display in the dressing room of the West Virginia Mountaineers, a team that had tumbled out of the sky, landed in Albuquerque unheralded and unknown, then splattered Texas Tech, and threatened to run Louisville right out of the gym.

“Nobody knew who we were,” West Virginia’s Mike Gansey said. “And then they were all chanting for us. It was quite a turnaround.”

On that magical Saturday in New Mexico, the Mountaineers started out by hitting everything they looked at. Tournament folk hero Kevin Pittsnogle couldn’t miss.

Neither could Patrick Beilein, the coach’s son. The lead grew rapidly: to 10, to 14, to 17, to 20. It was still 10 with just under 6 ½ minutes to go.

And then …

Well, what happened then is best described by the way John Beilein, the coach, looked when he finally scaled the podium at the postgame press gathering, looking as if he’d just gone 15 with the young Tyson, his shirt drenched and his face drained of color.

“My guys were winners,” Beilein whispered, “in every place but the final score. Louisville’s a great team. They had to play great to beat us. And they did.”

Too many college basketball stories end there, the way the original Rocky ended, the crowd chanting their name but fully aware that there’s likely to be no rematch. Sometimes it’s because they got where they got on the wings of precocious kids who barely wait to get back to campus before declaring for the draft. Sometimes it’s because there’s a glut of seniors on the vanquished team, meaning the chemistry simply won’t be there ever again in quite the same way.

And sometimes, it’s the reality of the gauntlet that these tournament brackets can be. It’s hard to duplicate success. Yet here the Mountaineers are, last year’s junior-dominated team now enjoying the twilight hours of their senior season.

Here comes Beilein, whose ascent last year was treated as such a feel-good basketball story but who, in reality, has been among the game’s greatest coaches for years.

Here they come with their No. 6 seed, with a little bit of good fortune when Northwestern State disposed of Iowa in a first-round stunner, with virtually the same cast that first captured the tournament’s attention, and later the nation’s imagination, with their cold-blooded 3-point proficiency, with their cunning backdoor cuts, with their old-school, hit-the-open-man way.

Beilein knew what his team was capable of, knew this they were a veteran team that thrived on challenges, so he threw one of the nation’s toughest schedules at them.

They’ve already played seven games against six of the other 15 members of the Sweet 16, including two wins against Georgetown and one apiece over Villanova and UCLA, plus a 76-75 loss last November to Texas, the team with whom the Mountaineers will square off in tonight’s second game.

“We probably needed the Oklahoma and UCLA wins so we weren’t sitting on the NCAA bubble at the end,” Beilein said. “I’m too old now to say wait until next year. I wanted to make sure we weren’t sitting around Selection Sunday, waiting and hoping.”

Now, they come back to another regional site, and again they are the most lightly-regarded of the teams here, their profile much lower than Texas or Duke, or even LSU. That’s fine.

They’ve waited a full year to try to get a sense of what the other locker room feels like, the one where everyone has a piece of the net and everyone’s making plans for the Final Four.

They may fall short again. But at least they get another whack at it. Few teams ever even get that much.