Connecticut Is the Be-All and End-All

SAN ANTONIO —  It wasn’t quite wire to wire, but it was close enough.

Connecticut, No. 1 at the start of the season, is the NCAA champion at its end after leading Georgia Tech by as many as 25 points and trailing for only 55 seconds of a runaway NCAA championship game Monday.

The Huskies’ 82-73 victory in front of 44,468 in the Alamodome gave Connecticut its second national title in six seasons and set up the possibility of a historic double.

Connecticut’s women play Tennessee for the NCAA title tonight, and if they win, it will be the first time a school has won both titles in the same year.

“We just won another banner, and the girls are about to win tomorrow,” said Connecticut guard Taliek Brown, who gleefully flung the ball into the air at game’s end and celebrated in the locker room with former Husky players Ray Allen and Richard Hamilton.

Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun, whose team is the fifth to win the title after starting the season ranked No. 1, just missed a bit of history of his own. Sorely disappointed that he was passed over for the Basketball Hall of Fame class announced here Monday morning, he probably earned his way in some other year by winning his second championship. Among active coaches, only Mike Krzyzewski and Bob Knight have won as many; each has three.

As Calhoun left the court, some Connecticut fans chanted “Hall of Famer, Hall of Famer.”

The second title came much easier than his first, a 77-74 victory over a heavily favored Duke team in 1999.

This time, Connecticut (33-6) led by 15 points at halftime -- the third-largest halftime lead in title-game history behind the mark of 18 shared by Ohio State over California in 1960 and UCLA over Dayton in 1967.

Down the stretch, Georgia Tech’s run of desperate three-pointers cut the lead to as few as seven points with 12 seconds left, but Connecticut was never really threatened.

“I don’t think it’s hit me yet,” said Connecticut center Emeka Okafor, who was named the most outstanding player of the Final Four after carrying Connecticut to a comeback against Duke in the semifinals and finishing the championship game with 24 points, 15 rebounds and two blocked shots.

“I keep thinking, ‘When is practice tomorrow?’ ” said Okafor, a junior who plans to graduate in May and turn pro. “It has not quite sunk in that it’s over and we did what we needed to do.”

By winning, the Huskies finally fulfilled the lofty expectations that Calhoun at times has called a burden.

“From September, we had folks on our campus, taking pictures, talking about us going undefeated, all these things we were supposed to do, and we really hadn’t even touched a basketball yet,” Calhoun said.

“But I always said I think we could be the best team in the nation.”

It was far different for Georgia Tech (28-10).

Unranked at the start of the season and picked to finish seventh in the Atlantic Coast Conference after freshman Chris Bosh left early and became the No. 4 pick in the NBA draft, the Yellow Jackets ended up second in the nation.

Their breakthrough was an early-season victory over Connecticut, but there was to be no repeat.

Okafor, held to nine points in that game as he struggled with back spasms, was far different in this game. Guard Ben Gordon, who scored 13 in the November game, scored 21 Monday, and Rashad Anderson, not even a starter in the first game, had 18.

“We just made history,” Gordon said. “After we’re dead and gone, we’re still going to have this national championship banner. We just immortalized ourselves.”

It might be fitting that he was talking about history. As fans chanted, “One more year,” Gordon, a junior who might turn pro along with Okafor, drew his finger across his throat as if signifying it’s over.

Georgia Tech had little of the juice that carried the Yellow Jackets to victory in the first meeting. (Connecticut helped by missing 20 free throws in that game.) Georgia Tech also got a total of 44 points from B.J. Elder and Isma’il Muhammad in the victory, and both were hampered by nagging injuries in the title game.

This time, the Yellow Jackets made only 38% of their shots, went seven for 22 from three-point range and made only 12 of 21 from the free-throw line.

Elder scored 14 points in his best recent performance after being held to two in the last three games while hobbled by an ankle sprain. Will Bynum, the hero of the semifinal victory over Oklahoma State with his last-second layup, led Georgia Tech with 17.

“Sometimes I think we make too much of a game of this -- I don’t want to say magnitude -- of this much attention,” Georgia Tech Coach Paul Hewitt said.

“This game could have happened in the middle of January, and it would have been like, ‘Hey, they won, let’s move on.’

“UConn is a very good team.... They’ve got some young men I think represent college basketball very, very well.”