Since the clock struck midnight a couple weeks ago, marking the start of St. Patrick’s Day — and the moment when Notre Dame outlasted Rutgers in double overtime, sending its coach, Mike Brey, in search of some celebratory Irish whiskey — the madness of the N.C.A.A. tournament has returned this March.
It had been a minute.
The tournament was canceled two years ago at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and last year it was so muted — sparse crowds, all the games in a single hub stripped of pageantry, players isolated from families, and fears that the N.C.A.A.’s budgetary bell cow might be waylaid by an outbreak.
So when Notre Dame and Rutgers traded haymakers in that play-in game — which may still stand as the tournament’s most captivating theater — it opened the door for more drama. New Mexico State’s Teddy Allen, the walking (and well-traveled) bucket, flummoxing Connecticut. Erratic Memphis throwing a scare into Gonzaga. Iowa State’s Tyrese Hunter, the freshman from Racine who wasn’t recruited by Wisconsin, helping knock out the Badgers in Milwaukee.
And, of course, everyone’s favorite underdog: St. Peter’s.
The 15th-seeded Peacocks from Jersey City, N.J., cut down Kentucky, dispatched Murray State and sent Purdue packing, turning a roster of mustachioed, bushy haired, no- and low-star recruits into something like America’s team. (A small sample, perhaps, but a sports bar in San Francisco filled with U.C.L.A., Duke and North Carolina fans erupted on Friday when Daryl Banks III sank a late jumper to put St. Peter’s ahead for good against Purdue.)
That it all unraveled on Sunday — not far from the Rocky statue at the base of the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art — landed like a Clubber Lang left hand.
All of a sudden, a tournament that was so tumultuous, so capricious, so egalitarian, had ended up with a Final Four that will carry a familiar, blue-blooded streak to New Orleans this weekend: Kansas, Duke, Villanova and North Carolina.
This will be the eighth championship these schools have combined for since 2008, with each of them winning at least one. And in a symmetrical twist, the championship next Monday night will be the 17th awarded to North Carolina, Villanova, Duke or Kansas since the Final Four first came to New Orleans in 1982.
Watching St. Peter’s players — smaller, slower and less skilled — appear so futile against North Carolina served as a reminder that by the end of this three-week basketball fiesta, talent, like North Carolina’s Armando Bacot swooping in for an offensive rebound, almost always wins out.
The last four champions have been No. 1 seeds, as have 11 of the last 15.
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