After a game that could not have been better, and an ending that could not have been worse, Butler and Pittsburgh retreated to the bowels of the Verizon Center to make sense of what they'd just done.
Until the final fraction of a second, they'd fouled each other relentlessly and executed offense flawlessly, creating a ballet of force and skill as mesmerizing as any in the recent history of the NCAA tournament.
And then, after it all fell apart with a senseless foul by Butler's Shelvin Mack and then an even more remarkable gaffe by Pittsburgh’s Nasir Robinson, the final takeaway from Butler 71, Pittsburgh 70 was not brilliance, but regret.
Regret for Mack, whose ethereal 30-point performance seemed destined to be sabotaged with 0.9 seconds left when he bumped Gilbert Brown at halfcourt after a layup from Butler's Andrew Smith gave the Bulldogs a 70-69 lead just a moment earlier.
“The mistake of my life,” he said.
Regret for Robinson, who couldn't explain why he contested the rebound off Brown's missed free throw — Brown made the first, tying the game at 70-70 — and grabbed the arm of Butler's Matt Howard, giving him a winning free throw with 0.8 seconds left instead of overtime.
“I wasn't thinking at all,” Robinson said, crying underneath the towel he'd wrapped around his head. “I tried to make a play. It was a dumb play.”
But most of all, there was regret that an extraordinary game and the lasting imprint of two basketball seasons came down to two whistles. After a game both deserved to win, and then both deserved to lose, the marvel of Butler and the agony of another Pitt postseason gone bad were nothing but sidebars to the recollection of 1.4 seconds that neither side could quite grasp.
“One of the things that needs to be made very clear is we're not a better basketball team than Old Dominion or Pittsburgh,” Butler coach Brad Stevens said. “We just had the ball last.”
It was easier for Butler, of course, to accept its season being at the mercy of Terry Wymer, who made the call on Mack, and Antonio Petty, who blew the whistle on Robinson.
After struggling much of the season — at one point, it was unclear if they'd even make the NCAA tournament at all — the Bulldogs came here as a No. 8 seed with few expectations of duplicating the championship game run they put together last year.
But after beating Old Dominion on a buzzer-beating tip-in by Howard on Thursday and then capping off an immaculate offensive performance last night with just enough grit to take down Pittsburgh, Butler's moving on to a Southeast regional against Wisconsin with another Final Four in its sights.
“As much as it would have hurt, and really stung quite a bit, if we had ended up losing,” Howard said. “If a guy gets pushed out of bounds, then it is a foul and should be called that way.”
Only 40 yards separated Butler's locker room from Pittsburgh's, but there was a gulf of emotion between them.
Ashton Gibbs, who'd been the Panthers’ best player all season, could barely talk above a whisper, but wondered aloud why they couldn't have just let it go to overtime. Sitting directly across from him, Robinson sat down and tried to explain why he'd contest the rebound when if he'd simply backed off, Pittsburgh would have had another five minutes to play.
Shaking his head the entire time, Robinson blamed himself five times in 75 seconds before he broke down, unable to say anymore.
“I'm smarter than that,” Robinson said. “I've been in this game too long to make a dumb mistake like that.”
It would have been bad enough to lose this game under any circumstances. With three senior starters, a Big East regular-season championship and a No. 1 seed, there had never been a more favorable setup for Pitt to get to the Final Four for the first time in school history. And even as well as Butler played, with Mack hitting huge shots and Howard playing nearly perfect post defense all night, Pitt matched them.
Butler had emptied the chamber, and still Pitt was on track to survive with the ball and a 69-68 lead with 46 seconds left. But disaster began right there with a shot-clock violation and didn't stop until everyone was in tears.
“I thought this was the year,” Gibbs said. “I was confident and everybody else was, and it's just tough to end like this.”
But perhaps the most remarkable thing was that even on a night when both teams played brilliantly, both understood what it felt like to lose. Butler's players are confident, but they're smart. As Brown stepped to the free-throw line, they knew he was more in charge of their fate than they were.
“I was thinking, Gilbert, just give us one,” guard Ronald Nored said.
Nored got what he asked for. He couldn't have imagined that a crazy collision of fortune and fate would, a fraction of a second later, give Butler much more.
