A November Night to Remember, a March to Forget

The Final Four is not only about the teams that get there.

It’s also about the teams that were left behind.

All this talk about unbeatable Duke, and Melvin Levett knows it isn’t true.

He and his Cincinnati teammates beat the Blue Devils, 77-75, Nov. 28 in the final of the Great Alaska Shootout.

Cincinnati and Duke were supposed to meet again the other day in the NCAA East Regional final.

It was Temple and Duke instead.

“It’s not a great feeling,” Levett said, nine days after the Bearcats’ 64-54 loss to Temple in the second round.

“You kind of really don’t want to watch any more basketball or what’s going on in the rest of the tournament.

“Your career is over. Being a senior, it’s a sick feeling, knowing you can’t put on the jersey again. You sit and think and watch old game films. You dissect what you did wrong a lot.”

He should also remember what he did right.

Against Duke, Levett did the honors on a dunk with one second left, toppling the No. 1 Blue Devils when Kenyon Martin passed to him on a backdoor cut after a length-of-the-court inbounds pass from Ryan Fletcher.

“Kind of similar to what they ran against Kentucky when Christian Laettner hit that shot,” Levett said. “Except I made a back-cut, and Kenyon threw the ball to me.”

Against Temple, he was four for 15.

“I think about the follow-through on my shot,” he said. “Most of them hit the front of the rim. I wasn’t getting my legs underneath me. I wasn’t following through. You think about a couple of passes, a couple of sequences that were very key.”

Cincinnati started the season 15-0, but finished 27-6.

The Duke game will live on as the highlight.

“It showed that we weren’t afraid of them. We weren’t intimidated,” Levett said. “We met the challenge. We played hard, played aggressive. We beat them at their own game.”

Now that Cincinnati is done, everyone asks.

Can anyone beat Duke?

“I don’t know. UConn, maybe,” Levett said. “I always tell people, ‘Nobody now, because we’re not in it.’

“We were a team that took every game one at a time, but it was always a thought. If we do meet them again, what will happen? Would we meet the challenge? I had a great feeling about it, that if we got back to a game against them, a regional final to go to the Final Four, we’d beat ‘em.”

One of the little ironies is that Levett will be in St. Petersburg, Fla., this weekend.

He’s scheduled to compete in a dunk contest and play in Friday’s all-star game, one of the preliminaries to the Final Four.

“I’ll probably stay and watch,” he said. “I’m kind of pulling for Ohio State, because I’m from Ohio.”

Whatever happens, happens.

So let Duke win. The Blue Devils’ record would be 38-1.

And everyone will have to remember.

They lost once.

“That was a very special moment,” Levett said. “It wasn’t in the NCAA tournament, but it was a shining moment.

“It wasn’t in March, but it was the shining moment of our season. Of my career. People will look back on it. Maybe it will get nominated for an Espy.”

Maybe Levett will get over it. Maybe not.

“Probably never,” he said. “You lose your last college game, and you never got the opportunity to play in the Final Four.

“I know a lot of people never make it. But I was close. We’d been a great team. We felt we should have been there.

“There will always be something incomplete in my life.”

POINT/COUNTERPOINT

The Final Four is a convention of standout point guards.

It will be Ohio State’s Scoonie Penn vs. Connecticut’s Khalid El-Amin in the first semifinal, and Michigan State’s Mateen Cleaves vs. Duke’s William Avery in the second.

Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun remembers Penn well from his time in the Big East at Boston College before he followed Coach Jim O’Brien to Ohio State.

“Scoonie gave us problems when he was at BC,” Calhoun said. “He’s one of those great, great ones that can put up 30 points on a given afternoon.”

O’Brien is preparing to contend with El-Amin, who did not make a basket in 12 attempts against Gonzaga but nevertheless was the team’s emotional leader.

“It’s uncanny how similar the point guards are,” O’Brien said. “In their case, Richard Hamilton is the leading scorer, but Khalid is their leader. It’s the same with us. [Michael] Redd is our leading scorer, but Scoonie is the guy that makes us go.”

All four point guards are capable of high-scoring games--Avery and Penn each have had 30-point games this season, El-Amin had a 28-point game and Cleaves had a 25-point performance.

“Avery, what I think separates him and is a little different from my guy is he’s such a good shooter,” said Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo, acknowledging Cleaves’ streakiness.

They’ll match up head-to-head Saturday for the second time.

“The guard play on the floor should be the highest level,” Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski said.

PRETTY BOY VS. THE GENERAL

One of the must-see games of next season has been determined.

It’s Iowa vs. Indiana, the first time Steve Alford, the new coach of the Hawkeyes, goes against Bob Knight.

Alford’s arrival will “make a whole lot of Hoosiers squirm,” columnist Bill Benner of the Indianapolis Star/News wrote. There are those who wanted to see Alford replace Knight sooner rather than later, and plenty of Indiana fans will find it hard to pull against him.

On the other hand, Western Michigan Coach Bob Donewald, a former Knight assistant, reacted angrily to a Benner column a year and a half ago suggesting Alford would be a fine replacement for Knight some day, saying no “pretty boy” would be fit to succeed Knight.

Now, instead of being a feel-good story at Division III Manchester College and Southwest Missouri State, Alford is a threat, and Benner compared him to a little puppy that grows into a growling dog.

“Cute and cuddly for a while. Then all of a sudden, the thing grows up, bares its teeth and bites you in the behind.”

QUICK SHOTS

Some of the national player-of-the-year and coaching awards were awarded too early to acknowledge the NCAA tournament developments that make Ohio State’s O’Brien the obvious coach-of-the-year pick over Auburn’s Cliff Ellis and vault Miami’s Wally Szczerbiak into the top five or even top three players, though Duke’s Elton Brand should still win. . . . When the Wooden Award is presented at the Los Angeles Athletic Club on April 2, there will be a 23-Final Four handshake between John Wooden (12) and Dean Smith (11) when Smith is honored with the group’s first Legends of Coaching Award. There might have been 31 Final Fours in attendance if Duke’s Krzyzewski were going to be there to add his eight. However, Krzyzewski is scheduled for hip replacement surgery shortly after the Final Four, and assistant coach Johnny Dawkins will accompany Brand and possibly Trajan Langdon to Los Angeles.

Why isn’t the San Diego State job more appealing? The school has a new 12,000-seat arena, a gorgeous location to lure recruits, no overwhelming academic requirements and a recent history so poor the only way to go is up. After Utah’s Rick Majerus and Gonzaga’s Dan Monson withdrew their names and former St. John’s coach Fran Fraschilla continues to look at other options, the San Diego Union-Tribune lightheartedly pitched . . . Tony Gwynn. Never mind that he isn’t through playing baseball for the Padres or that he hasn’t been around basketball most of the last two decades. Gwynn arrived at San Diego State on a basketball scholarship in 1977 and holds the Aztecs’ career assist records. “If one of those two jobs [San Diego State basketball or baseball coach] is open when I’m finished playing, I wouldn’t hesitate going for it,” Gwynn told the newspaper. . . . The Chicago Tribune reported that the talks between Notre Dame and Majerus ended after Rev. Edward Malloy, the university president, and Rev. E. William Beauchamp, the executive vice president, balked based in part on printed excerpts from Majerus’ recently released book, “My Life On a Napkin,” in which Majerus said it would be hypocritical for him to discipline an athlete for academic fraud because he had cheated as a student at Marquette. Notre Dame would have done better to look closely at the emphasis on academics Majerus has exhibited at Utah than by making a holier-than-thou decision based on the book.

Xavier’s Skip Prosser becomes the favorite for the Notre Dame job. The risky but potential home-run candidate is Princeton’s Bill Carmody, who has long said he isn’t wedded exclusively to the Princeton system. . . . Temple Coach John Chaney, who has lost a number of people close to him in recent years, including late assistant coach Jim Maloney, failed to reach the Final Four in his fourth attempt last week at age 67. “To think that we didn’t get to the Final Four, I’m still pretty damn proud of this team,” he said, but added you’re never prepared to lose. “You could see death a thousand times, and you’re never prepared for death,” he said. “Athletes should never be prepared to lose.”