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Villanova Upsets North Carolina to Claim First Title in 31 Years Villanova Upsets North Carolina to Claim First Title in 31 Years
(35 minutes later)
HOUSTON — With a buzzer-beating 3-pointer by Kris Jenkins, the Villanova men’s basketball team won its first national title in 31 years on Monday night, defeating North Carolina, 77-74, at NRG Stadium in the N.C.A.A. tournament’s championship game. HOUSTON — In an atrium inside the Davis Center, Villanova’s practice complex, twin 19-inch monitors inside a glass trophy case show a looping highlight montage of the 1985 men’s basketball national championship game. At the press of a button, a song can accompany it: “One Shining Moment.”
It was the Wildcats’ first championship since its memorable run as a No. 8 seed in 1985, which culminated with a win over Georgetown as one of the tournament’s greatest upsets. Villanova Coach Jay Wright presses the button each time he enters the building. The music has echoed in the ears of fans like him for 31 years. It lasted as the benchmark of athletic achievement for a small Catholic college from the suburbs of Philadelphia. But now there were two.
Phil Booth led Villanova with 20 points, and Ryan Arcidiacono added 16. Marcus Paige scored 21 points and Joel Berry II added 20 for North Carolina. The second one arrived on a buzzer-beating shot by Kris Jenkins, whose 3-pointer as time expired ended an instant classic at NRG Stadium on Monday night, stunning North Carolina, 77-74, and delivering Villanova its first national title in men’s basketball since the miracle team of 1985 won as a No. 8 seed.
This year, Villanova was a No. 2 seed out of the Midwest region, but the team peaked as the season wore on. After defeating Oklahoma on Saturday by a Final Four-record 44 points, the Wildcats continued their impressive play Monday against a top-seeded North Carolina team seeking its first championship since 2009. The ending Monday will not be forgotten easily, either. Trailing by 10 with five minutes remaining, the Tar Heels fought back to trim the lead in the closing moments. With 13.5 seconds remaining, Carolina was down by 3, but Marcus Paige, the senior guard, drained a double-clutch 3-pointer to tie the game.
He had had to adjust his shot to avoid a block by Ryan Arcidiacono. But the shot somehow went through with 4.3 seconds left, and Carolina fans tossed seat cushions into the air in jubilation.
Arcidiacono ran the ball up court and flipped it behind to Jenkins, trailing him. He pulled up for the shot and it rattled through as time expired.
Confetti exploded.
The players dogpiled.
“What do they say now?” Jenkins would say to the crowd, sweat dripping off his chin.
Carolina was vying for its sixth national title, and Coach Roy Williams his third, to move him into a tie for fourth on the career list with Jim Calhoun and Bobby Knight. He would have surpassed his mentor, the legendary North Carolina coach Dean Smith.
Instead, he congratulated Wright.
Arcidiacono, who was named the most outstanding player of the Final Four, scored 16 points. Phil Booth added a team-high 20 for Villanova.
Paige scored a game-high 21 points.
When he arrived four years ago, out of shape, mending a back injury, Arcidiacono knew he had a project on his hands. Villanova had been 13-19 the previous season, finishing 14th in the Big East. He started calling his freshmen teammates “the redemption class.”
“We wanted to get it back to the what the standards of Villanova basketball should be,” he said Sunday.
That meant returning the Wildcats to the Final Four, where they had not been since 2009. Wright’s team lost to North Carolina that year in Detroit, and he vowed to make some changes. His team was not going to be distracted by the setting, happy to be there. When they left the team hotel for the arena this year, for instance, they sneaked out a back door, instead of through dizzying throngs of fans in the lobby.
Both teams were experienced, led by senior guards (Paige and Arcidiacono) on a mission. There were no freshman prodigies expected to dazzle then ditch college for the N.B.A. This was a throwback game.
It had been a fitful regular season, with no dominating teams and a crowd of contenders leapfrogging one another at the top of the rankings. That uncertainty produced one of the wildest opening weekends in N.C.A.A. tournament history, with 13 first-round upsets, and 10 wins by teams with double-digit seeds.
All the while, both Villanova and North Carolina quietly established themselves as a cut above. The Tar Heels, the No. 1 seed in the East region, had yet to win a tournament game by fewer than 14 points. The Wildcats, a No. 2 seed from the South region, had to upset the top seed, Kansas, to reach the Final Four. But on Saturday, they delivered a performance for the ages, setting records for margin of victory (44 points) and highest field-goal percentage (71.4 percent).
Understanding the law of averages, Arcidiacono fully expected the shimmer from Saturday’s blowout over Oklahoma to wear off by Monday. “But we can always play our type of basketball,” he said, “and that’s tough defense.”
It was a sloppy start to the game, with the teams combining for four turnovers and only five field goals in the first five minutes. But Carolina, which had missed its first 12 3-pointers in Saturday’s win over Syracuse, delivered on five of its first seven, including three in a row from the same corner.
Carolina was leading, 32-30, with two minutes remaining in the half when Joel Berry II knifed through Villanova’s defense for an uncontested layup, prompting Wright to call timeout.
The Wildcats went into the locker room at intermission trailing, 39-34, despite shooting 58 percent from the field.
Villanova even outscored Carolina in the paint, 18-12, in the first half, a rarity against the Tar Heels’ interior size. A dry spell for the Tar Heels early in the second half allowed the Wildcats to retake a 49-46 lead with 12 minutes 45 seconds remaining. But neither team looked like it would pull away.
Villanova, relying on jump shots and pump fakes, kept North Carolina off-balanced defensively. The Tar Heels still remained indefatigable inside.
When Booth slid in for a layup, Paige answered with a 3-pointer. The lead, for either team, yoyo-ed by no more than seven points until free throws by Arcidiacono put Villanova up 8 with 5:58 remaining.
Williams, making his fifth appearance in the national title game, had been irritable with reporters in recent days, sensitive to inquiries about retirement or the ongoing N.C.A.A. investigation into Carolina’s long-running academic fraud.
They had been a team criticized for its softness, its inconsistency, and its failure to live up to the outsize expectations of Carolina tradition. That changed late in the year. Forward Kennedy Meeks (16 points) pointed to the team’s win on the road at Duke on March 5 as being its season-defining game, and they had yet to lose since, outscoring opponents by an average margin of 15 points.
Along the way, they had rediscovered some of the swagger that typically defines U.N.C. basketball teams.
“In college basketball, people don’t call it baby blue,” Villanova center Daniel Ochefu (9 points, 7 rebounds) said before the game. “They call it Tar Heel blue.”
Technically, that would be Carolina blue, or Pantone 542, an official designation the school tweaked last year. But on Monday night, another blue, Pantone 281 or Villanova blue to be exact, proved superior.