Sidelines
Only God knows
what happens next"How do you feel?" we ask them after games like this, and they struggle to tell us, because these are feelings you can't quite put into complete and coherent sentences, which is why we love sports in the first place. All they can do is reach for clunky cliches in their effort to please us ("Tonight we put all the marbles on the table," Carl English said), and this makes Predrag Savovic roll his eyes like Rodney Dangerfield and try to stifle a giggle at the silliness of it all.
The best way to judge is by actions and expressions and emotions worn on the sleeve. We got a picture of it when Riley Wallace raised a No. 1 finger to the sky at midcourt after the game, stabbing at the sky and then pumping a fist and pumping it again. Very un-coach-like. But this game, this win, was that big.
"I don't know that there's been a better basketball game played at this arena," Wallace said later.
That's how they felt.
Yes, better than Indiana or Kansas, bigger than Fresno State.
"This means more than any of those," Wallace said.
You have an idea, if you were there, or watched the game on TV or listened to it on the radio. The game had some early excitement and some late panic and lots of electricity in between. And in the end, with time flying away and hope dying, and Wallace sitting on the bench, Wallace having a love affair with this anxiety attack, somehow Hawaii found a way.
"When I see that it is crunch time, I feel responsible to do something," Savo said.
It was a perfect pick, the one that Mark Campbell set as Savo set up a step behind the 3-point arc. There was a crash of bodies, and then ...
Savo had the ball.
Time stopped.
"Hit it, Savo," a man in the front row said.
And then it all exploded.
Noise -- the band played, girls danced, the place blew up. One minute to go, one minute of chaos, one more minute of Cameron craziness.
Tulsa made a shot. Of course Tulsa made a shot. Tulsa would shoot almost 58 percent on the night -- answering, never going away, forever pursuing like a horror-movie monster.
You could feel their breath on your neck.
Hawaii felt it, felt it all night long, and the fans, who had come, and dressed up, and yelled and jumped and shook their ti leaves and shook them and shook them and shook them again, the crowd felt that desperation.
"I bet they had the time of their lives, too," English said.
They did. The Rainbows had one more run.
English's backdoor layup seized the lead again. The crowd weighed in on Tulsa's Kevin Johnson at the free-throw line, and exploded when he missed his first and made the second. The score was tied. Seconds left.
Mark Campbell would take the last shot. Mark Campbell drove. "He took the daylight all the way in," Wallace said. The shot was short, but there was a whistle. A whistle!
He broke the tie, and then Haim Shimonovich played defense and then all heck broke loose on the floor. What happened? How do they feel?
"I hit some 3's, and we won the game and now we're sitting at 13-2," Savo said. "And God knows what happens now."
Exactly.
Kalani Simpson's column runs Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
He can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com