Five years ago, Chuck Culpepper wrote one of the finest game stories of the last 10 years on the Villanova-UNC championship game. I use that story every year in my sports writing classes as an exemplar of a great story and especially a great lede.
HOUSTON — As a roaring basketball game in a roaring football stadium distilled to one final, soaring shot making its descent, 74,340 seemed almost to hush. The hush would not last. Kris Jenkins’s cocksure three- pointer from the right of the top of the key swished down through the net and into deathless fame, and all manner of noise broke out and threatened to stream through the years.
Villanova’s players surged into a pile. Villanova’s coaches hugged and hopped. Jaws dropped. Fans boomed. Streamers fell. North Carolina’s players walked off toward hard comprehension. The scoreboard suddenly read 77-74, and Villanova, a sturdy men’s basketball program with an eternal Monday night glittering from its distant past, had found another Monday night all witnesses will find impossible to forget.
On Sunday, Culpepper teamed with Glynn A. Hill to write another masterpiece off the Gonazaga-UCLA game:
INDIANAPOLIS — Just as one of the most riveting, pulsating games in the whole lunatic history of March Madness seemed bound for a second overtime, and just as Lucas Oil Stadium seemed primed to witness five more minutes of basketball of rarefied caliber, a Gonzaga freshman of an otherworldly smoothness breezed across the half-court line but not by much. He let one fly like all Stephen Curry. The ball traveled its 40-ish feet, the red lights squared the backboard, and the horn sounded.
Then it became disorienting to stop gasping and start figuring out the ending. Then coaches and players would greet each other with various levels of congratulation, consolation and confusion. Then the so-called losers of this national semifinal, those winners from UCLA, would trudge off the court with dazed expressions. Had Jalen Suggs’s storybook shot just smacked the backboard and dived right down to take a 90-90 donnybrook and tilt it, 93-90, to Gonzaga? Had the Minnesotan with a soaring future — and a present not so bad, either — really charged across the court and hopped upon a table to revel like mad while everybody else tried to process the thing?