Revisiting the 2005 Elite Eight, the greatest weekend in NCAA Tournament history

Twenty years later, there has never been a better 48-hour stretch of March Madness

Nostalgia’s a hell of a drug.

It distorts the past, making things that were enjoyable something much more legendary years later and things that were terrible seem much more tolerable than they actually were. It applies to any number of things – music, movies, television, politics, culture, someone’s everyday life and, yes, even sports, where forgettable NBA role players have a “So-and-so was a PROBLEM” highlight reel that circulates on social media.

For many, that nostalgia is at its strongest during their high school and college years, though for some, it may venture into the post-college early 20s. An album or movie hits differently. The broader world around you seems like a saner, kinder and simpler place. And in sports, the emotional highs of those adolescent or early adulthood years are never quite replicable.

As someone who has obsessed over college basketball for most of the past 30 years, I can point to an exact time when the sport I love delivered in a way it never has again – March 26-27, 2005.

That weekend, three of the four Elite Eight games during that year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament went to overtime, with the fourth game being a back-and-forth affair that was decided by only a couple of baskets.

For someone who was a 15-year-old freshman in high school at the time – a prime sports fandom age – it felt otherworldly. Even now, it’s more than just empty nostalgia. It really was that remarkable. It marked the first time that three regional finals in a single year went to overtime, surpassing the previous record of two. That year, in 1992, Michigan’s Fab Five beat rival Ohio State and, more famously, Christian Laettner had his buzzer-beater from the free-throw line to knock off Kentucky. The other two games, though? Indiana thumped UCLA by 27 and Cincinnati throttled the Artist Formerly Known As Memphis State by 31.

With another Elite Eight having wrapped up over the weekend, the splendor of 2005’s quartet of games lives on, having set a standard that has yet to be matched. And since it happened 20 years ago, why not take a look back at a time when the NCAA Tournament was as good as it ever has been?

Louisville 93, West Virginia 85 (OT)

The first matchup of the round, the Saturday late-afternoon tip-off, was perhaps the least expected heading into the tournament.

Louisville getting there wasn’t a huge surprise – the Cardinals were a top-five team in both major polls, but what was still a Conference USA program was relegated to a No. 4 seed – but West Virginia certainly was. The No. 7 seed knocked off Chris Paul and No. 2 seed Wake Forest in double overtime in the second round and got past Bob Knight and Texas Tech in the Sweet 16. Coach John Beilein introduced himself to much of the country with his precise, spaced-out offense that featured one particularly memorable player – Kevin Pittsnoggle, a tatted-up, 6-foot-11, born-and-bred West Virginian with a lethal outside shot who became a national cult hero.

For much of his team’s game against Louisville, he and his team’s story appeared destined to end with a Final Four appearance, which would have been the Mountaineers’ first since 1959, all the way back when Jerry West was their star player.

West Virginia came out firing, knocking down seemingly every 3-pointer it attempted. It wasn’t just that they were getting clean, largely uncontested looks, though there were some of those; it was the kinds of shots that were dropping. With the shot-clock winding down, Patrick Beilein drained a 3 from the logo. A few possessions earlier, the coach’s son banked in a 3 from just near the corner. The Mountaineers seemingly couldn’t miss and built a lead as large as 20 before it was trimmed to 13 at halftime against Rick Pitino’s heavily favored Cardinals.

Louisville, as you might have guessed from the score in the subhead, came back, but this wasn’t a standard collapse, where one team fell apart and its opponent merely pounced on a wounded animal. That 20-point advantage West Virginia built ultimately disappeared, but it continued to play really well.

After making nine of their 13 first-half 3s, the Mountaineers were even better in the second half, sinking nine of their 11 shots from beyond the arc. There were moments in which Louisville threatened to take the game over, but West Virginia routinely responded. The Cardinals got within three with 10:29 left, but 69 seconds later, the Mountaineers’ lead was back up to nine.

“We were playing great and they never folded,” Louisville guard Taquan Dean said, according to the Courier-Journal. “We had to take it from them.”

To do that, the Cardinals had to change their plan up a bit. At halftime, Louisville players convinced Pitino to abandon the matchup zone they had been employing and go instead to what Pitino was primarily known for – a full-court press and constant trapping. Pitino had avoided doing that all season given his team’s short bench and was especially cautious in the Elite Eight, which was being played 5,300 feet above sea level in Albuquerque, N.M. With the Cardinals down double digits, their opponent on one of the great shooting tears in NCAA Tournament history and the program’s first Final Four in nearly 20 years on the line, Pitino didn’t have much of a choice.

Louisville able to speed the game up a bit, force turnovers, get out in transition and, perhaps most valuably, have West Virginia’s possessions end with something other than a bomb from 3. Its previously stagnant offense kicked into high gear, scoring on 19 of its final 25 possessions.

Even with that, it wasn’t until only 34 seconds remained that the Cardinals were finally able to tie the game. The score remained that way until the final buzzer, with both teams unable to get the game-winning bucket on their final possessions. A game in which one team made 18 of its 24 3s in regulation was somehow heading to overtime.

Louisville dominated the extra period, out-scoring West Virginia 16-8. The Mountaineers, at last, went cold, missing all three of their 3s in overtime. By the time the final horn sounded, the sides had combined to make 29 3s, breaking an NCAA Tournament record that had been set in a 1990 game between Loyola Marymount in which the teams combined for 264 points

.“This was a lifetime experience for us,” Beilein said. “The only place we lost was on the scoreboard. I don’t know that we could have played better.”

As Louisville celebrated in its locker room inside The Pit, New Mexico’s famed arena, Pitino wrote on the whiteboard “Greatest comeback ever. You are now part of legend.”

As it turned out, it wouldn’t even be the greatest comeback of the day.

Illinois 90, Arizona 89 (OT)