Another Banner Year

You know what crushes teams more than anything else in college basketball?

Offensive rebounds off of missed foul shots. TigerBlog has seen it a million times. Most recently, it happened in the Duke-Central Florida game.

UCF had the No. 1 team in the country on the ropes before the Blue Devils escaped. And what was the key play? An offensive rebound off a missed foul shot, which gave Duke the game-winning basket with 12 seconds go play.

And yes, the last chance by UCF rolled excruciatingly around the rim and looked all the world like it was going in, only to roll out, making the final score 77-76 Blue Devils.

TB thinks Duke will win the tournament still, though he'd happy to be wrong about this one. He's rooting for Purdue, by the way, who looked great in hammering Villanova Saturday night. TB actually turned that one before the end because of how much the Boilermakers were ahead, and he never actually checked the final score on that one. Since Purdue was up more than 30 at one point, he figures they held on.

Let him check ... yup, Purdue won 87-61. Next up for Purdue is Tennessee, who played a great first round game against Colgate, who got 32 points from Jordan Burns, a sophomore, and led in the second half before falling 77-70. Tennessee then got out to a huge lead against Iowa yesterday before holding on 83-77.

It was a good weekend for NCAA basketball, but, as TB has noted, the best part of the tournament is over. As you know he thinks the tournament is unique in that gets less interesting with each passing round.

As for the Ivy League, its representative to the men's and women's NCAA basketball tournaments for 2019 both lost by five points.

That's close. Both lost to teams ranked in the Top 20 as well.

More specifically, the Princeton women lost to No. 17 Kentucky 82-77. The Yale men lost 79-74 to LSU, a team ranked 12th in the most recent poll.

If you look back at the last two NCAA tournament appearances by the Princeton men's team, they're both two-point losses, to Kentucky in 2011 and Notre Dame in 2017. If you go back further, the Princeton men have lost games in the NCAA tournament by extraordinarily close margins.

The most famous of those games was of course the one 30 years ago, when 16th-seeded Princeton fell to No. 1 Georgetown 50-49 in 1989. The Tigers would lose four straight NCAA games beginning with that one by a combined total of just 15 points.

What does all of this tell you?

It's not easy to win NCAA tournament games. There always seems to come that run, that five-minute stretch, where the Power Conference team pulls away.

In the end, after all of these games, the Ivy League team is left to think the same thing: "We could've had this." But it's just not easy to pull off.

You only get one chance, too. That's what makes it so tough. You did so many good things, and yet it was that one stretch that you couldn't overcome. "We could've had this."

Princeton's loss to Kentucky fit that mode. Princeton played hard. Princeton played well. Princeton did a lot of really good things. And yet Kentucky had the one key run in the third quarter that decided the game.

The Tigers were making their 10th NCAA appearance in the last eight years, and none of those trips are 1) easy and 2) to be taken for granted.

There are some years when the team has just rolled through the Ivy League, like in 2015, when the Tigers were 30-0 in the regular season and beat Wisconsin-Green Bay for the program's only NCAA win (and one of two in Ivy history).

Then there are years like this one, where Princeton has had to deal with adversity at every turn. Like when Bella Alarie broke her wrist in preseason and missed nine games. Or like when the team was 1-7 against a brutal early schedule.

Or, even more challenging, after the Tigers lost their Ivy opener against Penn on Jan. 5 and then had to wait for four weeks to get on the court again. And then again, when Princeton was 2-2, and two games back of Penn in the standings.

After that? There were 10 straight wins to close the league season, then two more in the Ivy tournament. And then the NCAA game.

Alarie came back to have the most amazing season any Princeton women's basketball player has ever had, capping it with 20 points, 15 rebounds and six assists in the loss to Kentucky. She finished the season with 525 points, the second-best total in in program history and just seven points off the single-season record held by Meagan Cowher in 2007-08.

Alarie averaged 22.8 points and 10.6 rebounds, and she still has a year ago.

Gabrielle Rush had a great senior year, and were it not for what Richmond Aririguzoh did on the men's side, TB would say she was the most improved player he's seen in Princeton basketball.

In fact, Rush, who finished her career with 22 points against Kentucky, set the Princeton women's single-season record with 93 made three-pointers. Only Sean Jackson, who had 95 in 1990-91, has ever had more in a season for a Princeton player.

Courtney Banghart always talks about how you need good seniors to win. In addition to Rush, Sydney Jordan had a great final game as well, with 17 points on 7 of 11 shooting. Jordan, by the way, also happened to win the Pyne Prize this year.

Where will the Tigers be next year?

Well, the idea of a ninth NCAA trip in 11 years is not crazy. There will be two returning first-team All-Ivy League players with Alarie and Carlie Littlefield, and then there figures to be a great supporting cast as well.

Nothing is ever taken for granted, as TB said. There are no guarantees of what one year will hold to the next.

For the Princeton women, there can be a lot of optimism for 2020 - as well as a lot of appreciation for what the 2019 season brought.

Another thing Banghart always talks about is hanging banners. The 2019 women's basketball team did just that - and they did so in a way that wasn't the least bit easy.