The Championship Game and Its Larger Significance

One inch.

That was the difference between a probable Butler win and...well, reality, which was a Duke win.

Butler, down by five with just over two minutes to play, had cut the Duke lead to one on a pair of Matt Howard layups. And after an ugly Kyle Singler shot that barely grazed the rim, Butler got the ball back with just over 35 seconds left. All the Bulldogs needed was one score to complete the dream.

But Gordon Hayward's high-arching shot over the outstretched arm of Duke's Brian Zoubek was a smidgen (I would never normally use that word, but that's the best way I can describe it) too long, bouncing off the rim back to Zoubek, who was immediately fouled with three seconds left. Zoubek made the first before intentionally missing the second (which, in retrospect, was a stupid decision, when you consider what happened next...what could have been). Hayward grabbed the rebound, took a few dribbles until he was a little over half court, and let the shot fly.

A whole nation waited.

It looked good. It was going in. The movie Hoosiers was going to have nothing on the ending of this game.

And then cold, hard reality hit as the ball hit the backboard, then the front rim, and finally the hardwood. Game over. Duke had won. Goliath had won. A team from a power conference had (once again) won the national championship.

Had Hayward's shot over Zoubek been an inch (or less) shorter, or had his final desperation heave hit the backboard slightly softer, Butler would have won. David would have won. A team from the small mid-major Horizon League would have won the national championship.

But maybe that underscores a larger reality...that while the score says that Duke won the game and the 2010 national championship, Butler was perhaps just as much a winner as its opponent. The normally-outlandish Gregg Doyel of CBSSports.com astutely wrote about this idea in his column on Monday (http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/story/13162720/butler-loses-battle-wins-war-for-our-memories?tag=headlines;other). Doyel basically said that, much like George Mason is the defining memory of the 2006 tournament, what we're going to remember from the 2010 tournament is not Duke winning the national championship. We're going to remember Butler. We're going to remember a small mid-major with an enrollment of just over 4,000 defying the odds and knocking out three heavyweights from major conferences to reach the championship game.

Doyel went on to say that had Duke totally destroyed Butler, obviously the enduring memory of the tournament would have been completely different. It would have legitimized the idea that Butler was "an overmatched pretender not worthy of being in this game, much less being in our memory." But of course, that did not happen. The Bulldogs hung neck-and-neck with the Devils for the entire game; they just fell a bounce short in the end.

So for every fan of underdogs and upsets, there is much positive to take away from this game, and really this tournament as a whole, even though it didn't have the storybook ending that we had all hoped for.

This tournament demonstrated that so-called mid-majors can play with and beat the big boys. And obviously Butler's journey to the finals (as well as impressive performances from other mid-majors like St. Mary's and Northern Iowa) will only help with recruitment for these programs, and for mid-majors in general. We all saw that a mid-major can actually win the NCAA tournament -- not have a nice little run, maybe win a couple games, but actually win it all. Recruits know it. And while maybe schools like Duke, UNC, Kentucky, and Kansas will continue to be the top choices of most top-notch recruits across the country, I think this year's tournament will have a long-lasting effect of making highly talented recruits more willing to play for a mid-major -- or at least less averse to playing for one.

Bottom line, there's little doubt in my mind that a team from outside the "Big 6" will eventually win it all. I could see it happening within the decade.

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Random sidenote: the CBS camera crew, or whatever executive was in charge of the camera angles, should be fired immediately for sheer idiocy. Who the hell wants to watch a good chunk of the game (including key parts of the last few minutes) from an overhead view or awkward diagonal sideview? Not me. Not any sane human being. I was watching the game with my dad, and the first time they went to one of the weird angles we looked at each other like, "This has got to be a joke, right?" And then it kept on happening. And happening. And we eventually realized that, no, they weren't trying to be funny...they're just terrible at life.