One of the great things about being a sports fan is that you are left with very vivid memories from your own life about where you were and what you were doing on certain days. This is the 37th season in which I have followed the Kentucky Wildcats, and the 8th in which we have made it to the Final Four. I can remember each of the other seven Saturdays in which Kentucky played in the national semi-finals, and I can look at the box scores to see what actually happened. Here is a brief history of seven important days in my life:
03/29/1975: Kentucky 95 - 79 Syracuse (San Diego, CA): This was the first year that I really rooted for UK, and I was still living the dream after UK's stunning upset of Indiana in the Mideast Regional finals the previous Saturday. I was only nine years old, I had never heard of Syracuse, and in my nine-year-old way, I assumed that they weren't very good and that UK would have an easy time of it. I was right; the Cats were up 44-32 at the half and they cruised to an easy win. I'm pretty sure I spent most of the second half running around the house playing imaginary games. I know for a fact that I missed the second game that day, in which UCLA beat Louisville in overtime, thus preventing an all-Kentucky final. But I didn't care; to me Louisville was just as far away as Los Angeles.
03/25/1978: Kentucky 64 - 59 Arkansas (St. Louis, MO): In retrospect, Kentucky's 1978 national championship looks almost pre-ordained; they were the number-one team in the country and they fully deserved the title. But that 1978 tournament was brutal. In the round of 32, UK was down 39-32 at the half to Florida State before coming from behind to win. In the Mideast Regional final, Kentucky just barely survived 52-49 against a Michigan State team led by Magic Johnson. And then this game turned into a long, painful grind -- UK was up 32-30 at the half and never had much of a lead. It was a terrible game for a 12-year-old to have to sit through. But UK made it and I made it, and we were on to the next round.
03/31/1984: Kentucky 40 - 53 Georgetown (Seattle, WA): There was a lot of disappointment in the six seasons between 1978 and 1984, so I was very nervous about this game. In fact, I thought this game was basically for the national title -- the winner would get Houston in the final, and we had already beaten Houston. I was planning to watch this game and then go to a dance at Heath in the evening. (Back then, they still played the Final Four in the afternoon.) I was terrified that UK would get off to a terrible start, but in fact they got off to a great start. We were up 29-22 at the half, and I still remember thinking that UK was going to win the national championship. It didn't happen, of course. In fact, I've never seen anything like that second half. UK could make any shots -- not long shots, not close shots, not layups, not anything. They went 3-33 from the field in the second half. It was just about the saddest ending to any season I have ever seen. (Oh, and the dance was really bad -- everyone was too depressed about the game).
This was the last time I was in Kentucky for a UK final four game.
04/03/1993: Kentucky 78 - 81 Michigan (OT) (New Orleans, LA): Between 1984 and 1993, a lot of changes took place in my life. I graduated from high school, from college, and from law school. I passed the bar. I got married. And in March of 1993, I learned that I was going to become a father. But for the moment, I was at a safe haven in my life. I had a job, I had some free time, and I threw myself into basketball. UK's 1993 team is probably my personal favorite of all the teams I ever saw, and I don't think I've ever spent as much time thinking about basketball as I did that year. All year, I had believed that we would beat any team we played -- with the possible exception of Michigan. So I was a nervous wreck when this game started, and I spent the whole evening pacing back and forth in my little apartment and yelling about everything. The 1993 Tournament was a corker, and this was one of the best NCAA games ever played -- and probably the best game that the Fab Five ever played. Michigan was up 40-35 at the half, and UK was not playing well. But the Wildcats kept fighting and eventually sent it into overtime. By this point, the Cats were in a bit of a groove, and Jamal Mashburn (26 pts, 6 rebounds) was really starting to wear out Michigan on the inside. Again, I started to think we were going to win -- but then Mashburn fouled out and UK pretty much collapsed. It took a very long time to recover from this loss.
03/30/1996: Massachusetts 74 - 81 Kentucky (E. Rutherford, NJ): Few fan bases have gone through what Kentucky fans experienced from 1992 to 1996. Year after year we had awesome teams and lots of blowout victories, only to fall short in the tournament. In 1992, we lost on the Laettner shot. In 1993, we lost in OT to Michigan. In 1995, we lost in the Elite Eight to UNC. A lot of experts had concluded that Pitino's system simply was not fundamentally sound -- that something would always go wrong for UK. In 1996, of course, UK had an unbelievably good team. They simply destroyed people. But, of course, we knew it would all be for naught if we lost this game. And UMass was really, really good. They only lost one game all year, and they would have won the national title in almost any other year. By this point I was living in a little house with a baby (and another one on the way), and I had been sobered by recent losses. Kentucky ran out to a 36-28 lead, but the second half seemed to go on forever, as UK could never get on a big run and UMass just kept making run after run after run. But finally, UK held them off and we were back to the finals for the first time in 18 years.
03/29/1997: Kentucky 78 - 69 Minnesota (Indianapolis, IN): Winning the title made a huge difference in my mood, and I was really calm and confident throughout this whole tournament. Until the last game of the 1997 tournament, UK never had too much trouble. In this game, UK was up 36-31 and led all the way through the second half. In retrospect, however, I shouldn't have been so calm about this game. It turned out to be the very last game that Rick Pitino won as coach of the Wildcats -- and, although I didn't know it at the time, it marked the end of an era in my life as a fan.
03/28/1998: Kentucky 86 - 85 Stanford (OT) (San Antonio, TX): Kentucky had a new coach, but a lot of the same players -- and I was back in the same living room where I had watched every tournament since 1994. I watched almost all of UK's games from 1994 to 1999 in that room, and the Cats almost never lost. By now I had two kids, but on this day I cleared out my schedule and settled on the floor in front of the TV. In my mind, UK had already beaten a much better team the week before when they knocked off Duke, and I kept waiting for the Cats to put Stanford away. But while Mike Montgomery's other Stanford teams consistently choked in the tournament, this one did not and the game dragged on and on. In fact, Stanford was up 37-32 at the half, and UK spent the whole second half trying to come from behind -- and then the Cats needed all of overtime to finally put Stanford away. The Cardinal made 11 three-pointers in this game -- to only 5 for UK -- and it is very hard to win under those circumstances. But this was Jeff Sheppard's game (he had 27 points and made a number of huge three's down the stretch), and he pulled it out for us. At the time I remembered thinking that it seemed almost too easy -- three trips to the title game in a row? -- and I was very optimistic about the future.
Little did I know, of course, that it would be 13 years before we got back to the Final Four. Now I have a different house, and two more kids, and a lot less hair than in 1998. But there is still no better way to spend a Saturday than getting ready for a Final Four.
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