HOUSTON — For two enchanted NCAA Tournament runs, Shelvin Mack and the Butler Bulldogs lived the Cinderella dream. When the clock finally struck midnight on a Monday night deep in the heart of Texas, harsh reality really bit.
For the second year in a row, Butler fell one victory short of the national championship. A suffocating Connecticut defense and historically dismal Butler shooting combined to give UConn its third men's basketball NCAA championship with a 53-41 victory before 70,376 in Reliant Stadium.
University of Kentucky basketball fans of a certain vintage will recall the nightmare 3-for-33 shooting performance the Wildcats of Sam Bowie, Kenny Walker etc. ... endured in the second half of a 1984 Final Four semifinal loss to Georgetown.
Butler spent a whole championship game reliving that nightmare.
The Bulldogs were a brutal 12-for-64 from the floor for the game (9-for-33 from three-point range). "Forty-one points and 12 of 64 is not good enough to win any game, much less the national championship game," Butler Coach Brad Stevens said.
A season ago, Butler — a school of some 4,000 that plays far from college basketball's bright lights in the Horizon League — made an unlikely march to the national title game only to lose by two to mighty Duke in a game considered an all-time classic.
You could cross-breed an aardvark with a horny toad and not get something as ugly as the beating Big East power Connecticut put on the Bulldogs on Monday night.
UConn's long frontline players Alex Oriakhi (6-foot-9), Charles Okwandu (7-1) and Roscoe Smith (6-8) were able to harry Butler star forward Matt Howard into a horrid 1-of-13 performance.
"We kept saying, 'keep shooting, keep shooting, the shots have to start going in," Howard said. "They never did."
UConn Coach Jim Calhoun put wiry 6-5 freshman Jeremy Lamb on Mack. The Bryan Station product — scorching throughout the 2011 NCAA Tournament — led Butler with 13 points but hit only four of 15 shots.
Said Mack: "They were able to contest shots normal people guarding me couldn't contest."
Amazingly — and in a tribute to how good Butler's defense is, too — the Bulldogs fired scuds all night yet stayed in contention deep into the game. With 11:50 left, Butler was 8-for-46 from the floor yet trailed only 33-28.
Butler actually led 22-19 at halftime after Mack drained a trey one second before the intermission. The Bulldogs went up 25-19 on their first possession of half two when Chase Stigall stuck another trey.
Then UConn's defense absolutely locked down. Between Stigall's three at 19:38 and a pair of Mack three-pointers inside the game's final 2:04, Butler scored all of three field goals.
"We knew that we could really defend them," Calhoun said. "The major (halftime) adjustment was that we were going to outwill them and outwork them and, eventually, we outplayed them."
In a "state of college sports" address here last week, NCAA President Mark Emmert listed integrity — or the lack thereof — as the biggest issue facing major-college athletics.
With UConn's victory, the NCAA champion is also on NCAA probation. Connecticut was penalized earlier this season after the NCAA said a former Huskies student manager had been providing a potential recruit with cash, clothes and shoes.
If the scandal gives Connecticut men's basketball a bit of a smelly air, there was nothing not to like about the Huskies' players that made Calhoun one of five coaches (Wooden, Rupp, Krzyzewski and Knight) with at least three NCAA titles.
Led by Kemba Walker (16 points on 5-for-19 shooting), UConn completed one of the improbable championship runs in college hoops history.
After limping home ninth in the Big East regular season standings, the Huskies won five straight games to take their conference tournament championship. Then they came back in the NCAAs to win six more in a row.
It was a bitter finish to a fantastic tournament for Mack, who was seeking to become the first product of Kentucky high school basketball to win an NCAA championship since Andre Buckner (Hopkinsville's University Heights Academy) for Duke in 2001.
(Former Lexington Catholic star Natalie Novosel will try to help Notre Dame win the women's NCAA championship Tuesday night against Texas A&M).
Mack made the Final Four All-Tournament team for the second straight year. But that wasn't the trophy he wanted to leave Texas with.
"It's very upsetting when you have your chances, your opportunities and you just let them slip away," Mack said.
As Butler found out in the most harsh of ways Monday, there seems to be a glass ceiling on wearing the glass slipper.
