|
Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
November is too early
for basketball madness
THEY did it. They did it by keeping their composure, last night, and how I'll never know. The Rainbows won this game by somehow keeping their heads when all about them was insanity.Every play was frantic for Hawaii, every pass was contested, every call was close. Every whistle was the end of the world.
"It was everything I thought it would be," Riley Wallace said. "Or I hoped it would be."
They did it. Somehow these Rainbows beat Southern Illinois, a team that will be playing into March. They did it in dramatic fashion. They kept their grip when all was melting down around them, when everyone in the building was losing his mind.
Somehow, under relentless pressure, Vaidotas Peciukas went to the basket. Good. Score. Down one with 43 seconds left and the clock ticking and the crowd screaming and the game slipping away, Peciukas took it to the floor and took it to the hole. And it fell. Beyond clutch.
The band played "We're Not Going To Take It." The crowd came out of the timeout roaring to its feet.
You can imagine what it must have been like.
Then Southern Illinois' star player, Darren Brooks, missed. There was a fight for the rebound, for the ball, for the game. Tied up! Arrow! Arrow! Arrow!
Hawaii's ball.
Hawaii's game.
It wasn't quite that simple, of course. Nothing was, last night. There was always one more free-for-all, one more whistle, one more skipped heartbeat. It wasn't until the final buzzer that Hawaii was safe.
It was raucous. It was violent. It was a body-slamming slugfest. It looked like a Big Ten football game out there.
(Well, maybe not a Northwestern Big Ten football game.)
You half expected to see snow flurries coming down onto the court.
Oh, Southern Illinois was midseason ready. And Midwestern tough.
"We won't face too many teams that get up in us like that," Julian Sensley said.
The game was only seconds old when Bobby Nash had his shot blocked on his way to the basket. He came crashing down to the floor, skidded into the end table at the baseline's edge. He lay there, looking up at the ref. Play on. No call.
The refs were letting it all hang out.
"Their officials," Wallace said. The road team got to pick.
This was the kind of game it was going to be.
SIU was suited to that type of game.
But then there was Nash filling the lane. Layup. Showtime. There was Sensley with a tip-in, then Jake Sottos with a 3, and the lead. Then Nash with a 3, and a scream.
This was the kind of game it was going to be.
Then there was Sensley, with a Larry Bird pass -- over the shoulder, behind the head -- and Matthew Gipson dunked. And Sensley with an up and under alley-oop. A reverse layup alley-oop!
UH went into the second half with a cushion, then lost it. SIU's points were coming far too easily. In order to score, Hawaii was working much too hard.
The wrong team looked like the road team.
"We can't let games like this slip away," Sensley would say.
"You've got to be impressed with the way they play on-the-ball defense," Wallace would say.
But then the Rainbows got some rebounds and the Rainbows got a few calls (a few). Soon they were all playing like Matt Gibson -- Gibson, the Hawaii guard who gives the impression with his play that he may, at some point in his life, have been voted most likely to take an elbow to the head.
And Sensley threw a blocked shot back out of the lane.
What a game.
At one point Wallace did a stomping, high-stepping Red Grange of a run out of his chair.
He lost it, but he got it back. His team did, too, somehow. How I'll never know. It's still November. Far too early to be this poised. Far too early for a finish this wild. Far too early to beat a team this good. I'm exhausted. I'm going to bed.