Kentucky survives, if barely, and advances

The Wildcats, now 38-0, were nearly one-loss-and-done before the Final Four. They were wrong-footed by a smallish opponent operating on gall and guile and old-school backdoor cuts. Only 48 hours after being proclaimed one of the greatest teams in collegiate history on the strength of Thursday’s 39-point annihilation of West Virginia, Kentucky looked for most of the night like the second-best team on this floor.

It’s not as if the Irish don’t have a history of shocking — they ended UCLA’s 88-game winning streak in 1974 — but even Adrian Dantley, a forward on that team, was doubtful a similar result was possible. “They’re going to need God to beat Kentucky,” Dantley told the Wall Street Journal.

In the end, Kentucky was just too big, too strong, too relentless. The Irish couldn’t stop Karl-Anthony Towns, who scored 25 points in 25 minutes and kept the Wildcats alive at a time when nothing else was working. Towns’ three-point play with 4:08 left brought the Wildcats within two, and Aaron Harrison’s deep trey with three minutes remaining put Kentucky ahead for the first time in 11 minutes.

Then Notre Dame’s Jerian Grant hit a 3-pointer at the shot-clock horn to make it 66-64. Another Towns hoop tied it. With 33.6 seconds remaining, Willie Cauley-Stein blocked a Grant 3-pointer that led to a shot-clock violation. After Andrew Harrison’s go-ahead free throws, Grant drove upcourt and let fly from the left corner. Air ball.

“My mind is never on, ‘We may lose,’ ” Kentucky coach John Calipari said afterward. “We’re not playing not to lose … I know (his players will) make plays. It’s a matter of keeping us close enough for it to matter.”

The game was tied at the half, a score that flattered the Wildcats. They’d been outscored 13 baskets t0 10, outshot 37 percent to 46.4. Eight of Notre Dame’s 13 hoops came via assists, as the Irish — surely borrowing from Georgia coach Mark Fox’s game plan — sent their guards driving into the Kentucky forest, where they would either flip home a layup or kick to a cutting teammate.

The Irish led for 8:12 of the half, which constituted a major departure from Thursday’s game, when West Virginia didn’t lead for a millisecond. This was the start Irish coach Mike Brey had hoped he’d get, the kind Duke had gotten against unbeaten UNLV — Brey was a Mike Krzyzewski’s assistant — in the epochal 1991 upset.

Notre Dame had given itself reason to believe against a team that seldom had cause to doubt. Kentucky changed its lineup to open the second half — Devin Booker and Tyler Ulis started ahead of Trey Lyles and Aaron Harrison — and that spawned a quick five-point lead. It went away even faster.

The Irish scored on their next six possessions — this against Kentucky, which West Virginia’s Bob Huggins called the best defensive team he’d ever faced — to seize a 46-42 advantage. This prompted a Calipari timeout, and at that moment his Wildcats weren’t a team for the ages en route to a coronation. Instead the Big Blue was a shaken favorite desperate for a stop.

The ACC champ had entered as a double-digit underdog. Think about that. In the history of this event, surely no ACC champ has been afforded so little chance. But that’s what Kentucky had done to college basketball: It had rendered the sport a game of haves and have-nots, with the only haves being the team with the eight active McDonald’s All-Americans.

The second-best team in the SEC this season might have been Kentucky’s reserves, which said much about Kentucky but something about the SEC, too. The Wildcats had a couple of close calls early in the conference season — beating Ole Miss and Texas A&M, both in overtime — and then nothing much until early February, when LSU took a six-point lead with six minutes remaining.

After that, the closest anyone came was Georgia in Athens on March 3. The Bulldogs led by nine points with nine minutes remaining. They lost 72-64. Huggins said this week that was as well as anybody had played the Wildcats and that Fox’s spread-the-Wildcats-and-exploit-the-gaps game plan was inspired.

Informed of this praise via email, Fox responded by writing: “It is nice of him to say that, but we didn’t beat them. I do not think the ’Cats are invincible, but it will take one heck of an effort to beat them.”

The Irish gave that effort, but they were beaten at the end by what must still be considered a great team — a great team that won on a lesser night and is bound for Indianapolis, still unbeaten, still the team to beat.