We begin, as all great narratives do, in Louisville, where the Bellarmine Knights are holding a press conference. It’s just the players. They’re really sad. Nobody told them they wouldn’t get to play in the NIT. In fact, somebody told them they would get to play in the NIT. They would like so badly to play in the NIT. They are very upset. Their coaching staff is standing sheepishly in another room. They should’ve known. They might’ve known. This is very awkward for them.
The music starts.
If we can be transparent for a moment, we didn’t get the rights to “One Shining Moment” this year. Instead, we’re playing “Rent a Cop,” Ben Folds’s smash hit from the EP “Super D.” We don’t have the rights to that song either, but it seems unlikely anyone will enforce this copyright violation. If you’re a Vanderbilt or Belmont or (throwback here) a Lipscomb fan and you see Ben Folds around town, keep your mouth shut. We cannot get sued again. Our legal team is a guy we routinely text, “So we know you can’t give legal advice, but…” He definitely won’t represent us in court. He can’t even give us legal advice!
Anyway, the music starts right as a shot clanks off the front of the rim in Norman, Oklahoma. The vibes are sloppy, and they remain so through the opening montage. We’ve got refs looking panicked in Denton. We’ve got a cavalcade of missed dunks in Toledo. We even snuck in a clip of Steve Pikiell doing the “What the hell was that??” face. You know the one. That guy deserved to be here. Man.
Gradually, as the montage proceeds, the play gets better. Umoja Gibson drains a three. Caleb Lohner pulls down a rebound with authority. Tony Bennett smiles. We linger on that.
We move on into an, “Oh yeah! those guys were in this!” portion. Rick Pitino. VCU fans. Rick Pitino. That guy who made all the threes this year for Belmont. Rick Pitino. The ghost of Orville Wright smoking a pipe watching a high school game at UD Arena. Rick Pitino. It’s like an in memoriam reel, but the dead have all come alive again, and their ghostly figures are prowling sidelines and bleachers and three-point lines alike (sorry, Ben Sheppard, didn’t mean to make you a ghost, that just kind of happened).
Our first big moment comes during the bridge, when we turn down the music a touch so we can hear Buzz Williams make his selfless case that Rutgers should have made the NIT rather than Texas A&M. He’s got the documents. His printer is whirring in a split-screen. We cut in the Steve Pikiell face. We love the Steve Pikiell face.
Having failed to adequately trim this video to match the length of the song, we’re quickly into our second time through the words, and it coincides with the start of the tournament’s second round. This proves advantageous when the line, “They love my little mustache,” comes up, because we can flip to Adam Kunkel cracking a cheeky grin, but besides that, it’s not a great look. This song is going to get very old. You’re all going to be sick of this song. Many of you won’t have previously known it existed, but you will never forget its existence again.
The comic relief of the mustache scene is quickly dashed. Paul Scruggs is in pain. It’s a somber moment, and we’re really wishing we hadn’t picked a song about a creepy mall security guard as our music for this. Did Jonas Hayes just give us a dirty look through our own NIT tribute video? Resolve fills the Musketeers’ eyes as Folds sings, “…butt into that underwear. Yeah, yeah!”
We’re in Denton. Grown men are wearing green-and-white striped overalls. Bennett looks strangely at home. Mardrez McBride is splashing threes, though, and with the clock showing some unremembered low number of seconds, Bennett designs the worst closing-moments play of his illustrious career. After it fails (Bennett does a great “yep, should’ve seen that coming,” face here, that guy really worked the camera well for us all month) Grant McCasland pulls together a side huddle with his coaches and still draws up a terrible look himself, and we eventually just cut away rather than showing highlights from overtime. The basketball gets a little too good for our tastes in overtime.
Back in Norman, Kyle Lofton heats up. Back-to-back threes (we cut out the mess in between) put the Bonnies ahead. A shot of revelry in a dorm room in Olean follows. Bonnie fans hurry to their computers to look for where to buy quarterfinal tickets. The game is…in Charlottesville? The music cuts out as we zoom in on a horrified Captain Beer doing Much’s “The Scream.” The music picks up again. I told you you’d get sick of this song.
The Bonnies road trip to Charlottesville. Emotions run high. Virginia fans are shown in existential crisis, caring but trying not to care and getting progressively more flustered. The collars on their golf shirts are all askew. Osun Osunniyi is swatting a ball their way. The buzzer is sounding. The Bonnies are headed to New York. One young Cavaliers fan sheds a solitary tear (might have been allergies).
Now, Cincinnati. Vanderbilt fans are there. Vanderbilt fans are rowdy. Vanderbilt fans have a few trombones??? Scotty Pippen is vibing, and so is his dad. Lot of clips of those two. But what’s this? Jonas Hayes has a steely look of determination in his eye? His guys are rallying to the flag?? Xavier’s coming back??? Pandemonium on the streets of the Queen City. Someone tears the N and the I off the “Cincinnati Enquirer” sign. They can’t find a T. They carry the N and the I around, delirious. Grown women weep.
We interrupt our quarterfinal highlights for a Rob Lowe Atkins commercial. Rob Lowe reaches out through the screen to offer us a quaalude. We respectfully decline.
Realizing halfway through production that we haven’t given enough attention to Kyle Smith, we put in a long shot of him in a decision room back in Pullman. Assistants at computers, many screens whirring, staffers calling out suggestions, Smith spinning and pointing and bantering and pointing some more and—is Kyle Smith dancing? Ok, not dancing. Just an especially rhythmic series of spins and points.
We go to College Station, where Steve Forbes is furious. ACC Player of the Year Alondes Williams can’t get going. ACC scoring machine Jake LaRavia has his head in his hands on the bench. Aggie fans are riotous in the stands. Buzz Williams is letting out primal, victorious yells (internally—being respectful on the outside). Starry-eyed A&M boys on the baseline look on in awe. If only they could yell like that!
Now, Provo. A sea of white (talking about the shirts, but…yeah). Kyle Smith looks at his assistants. Every one of them looks at him nervously, in unison. Smith gives a sly smile. The rout is on. We smash together a bunch of clips of Michael Flowers getting buckets. He’s a bucket-getter, that Michael Flowers.
What follows is a little travel sequence. St. Bonaventure administrators are calling shady bus companies, whose managers make vague references to Russia and gas prices. Washington State fans look at New York on a map and point at all the mountain ranges in between (they skip the Ozarks, everyone always skips the Ozarks, no one ever respects the Ozarks), then hurriedly empty their wallets onto their kitchen tables so they can start counting cash. Sean Miller’s being introduced at Xavier, and we’ve turned down the music again, but instead of playing Miller’s comments we’ve dubbed in the Thom Brennaman apology but we’ve also dialed it up two octaves because we were a little buzzed one night and thought that’d be a good bit, and damn it all, we were right. What’s this? We turned it up a third octave for the “I don’t know if I’ll be putting on this headset again” part? Must have been divine inspiration. All credit to the muses.
Finally, we’re in the big city. Planes touch down. Wide-eyed college kids look up at the skyline. Buzz Williams does a really, really cool handshake with a bellhop. Did they practice that? That was sweet. Something’s off, though. Something’s wrong. Michael Flowers looks oddly troubled.
We go to the roads of the land upstate. Or maybe it’s Pennsylvania. Or possibly New Jersey?. Smoke is billowing from one of the Bonaventure buses. The driver is fleeing into the woods. Is that Barry Zuckerkorn in a little green vest?
Dominick Welch does all he can, but Xavier is too much. Captain Beer is shown exasperated in the crowd, giving it his all. A Zach Freemantle basket collapses his oft-hopeful, beer hat-adorned face into a state of resigned sadness.
Then, A&M time. Flowers is off. Flowers is so off. Kyle Smith is the most stylish man in New York with his Cougar tie on a red shirt, but the Cougs can’t buy a bucket. Quenton Jackson is seen levitating during a TV timeout. Buzz Williams calmly speaks some Latin words into his ear, and he rises another few inches off the floor. Fran Fraschilla asks Hassan Diarra after the game if he’s gotten his teammates all that pizza yet, and Diarra says, “Ha, yeah, man, pretty good stuff!” and then Fraschilla asks him eight additional questions about it while Diarra looks more and more uncomfortable and gives shorter and shorter answers and teammates after teammate of his empties the room to get back to the hotel. Eventually, Diarra does successfully flee, scampering through the streets of Manhattan, looking back every few faces in fear Fraschilla will be droning on about a “NEW YORK Slllllice!”
Before the championship, we get extended glimpses at the pregame routines of each coach. Buzz Williams is scrawling note after note with neat penmanship and a stunning vocabulary. Jonas Hayes is staring into each of his player’s eyes and asking them what they most want out of life, death, and the spaces in between. The ball, again, is tipped.
Xavier comes out hot. Texas A&M can’t unravel their mental threads, Hayes having tied them too tightly to be snipped. Colby Jones plays like a man possessed, but Kunkel can’t find his groove. Williams behooves his men (he actually says, “I behoove you,” in the timeout) to play with more guts. They answer. The guts are shown. Xavier goes cold. Diarra forces Fraschilla’s pizza talk out of his mind and, finally free, begins to play like he hasn’t played since that Arkansas game back in Tampa. A&M takes the lead into the half.
At halftime, Hayes walks off alone. He paces the halls of Madison Square Garden, sees Sean Miller down there puffing on a cigarette, and quickly turns around, unseen. Ducking down a side corridor, he finds a middle-aged man dressed in a retro-cut suit, wearing a tie with a quaint gold pattern on blue. “When the time comes, Jonas,” the man says, and hands Hayes his watch. Hayes leans in and shoots a questioningly look into his eye. “For the old Big East. Where our schools long did battle. Our two schools. Xavier and mine. You know, the old Big East? The conference we’ve always been a part of, our two schools? Our two Eastern schools?” Hayes looks at the back of the watch, where a simple pair of letters is inscribed: “A.M.” He walks back to the locker room. Could it be?
Midway through the second half, Xavier’s holding it together, but things look grim. Kunkel’s just been called for his fourth foul. For the first time all tournament, Hayes shows a hint of rattlement. He looks to the rafters. Is that…is that the man in the suit? He pulls the watch from his pocket. It’s an hour behind. Guy must have missed Daylight Savings. He corrects the time, and a voice echoes in his head: “When the time comes, Jonas.”
Suddenly, the referees are heading to the monitor. A new angle is shown. The foul is reassigned to Freemantle. Hayes looks back to the watch, his eyes quietly astonished.
We cut ahead to the closing moments. Quenton Jackson is at the free throw line. The score is tied. There’s one shot to be shot. It hits the rim, spins up in the air, and falls through the net. Folds sings: “No, kid, they don’t give me a gun…”
In the ensuing timeout, Hayes looks at the watch again, but the time on it is correct. There’s nothing to change it too. There’s no magic left. Besides, of course, the magic within himself. He knows. It’s on him now. He draws up a play.
As the clock winds down, Kunkel forces the ball into the lane, but his contested shot can’t connect. Freemantle gets the rebound, but his shot is blocked out of bounds. The clock reads 5.9 seconds. Xavier inbounds the ball. We get a closeup of Hayes’s fingers wrapped tightly around the watch.
The ball goes in to Jack Nunge. As he pivots into the paint, we turn the slow motion all the way down, showing low moment after low moment of Nunge’s in Iowa City up in the corners of the screen, faded, an illustration of the arduous path he’s taken to this moment but also a metaphor for his life flashing before his eyes, as a life-defining moment has been thrust upon him, a moment that will either live in universal glory forevermore or be a sad memory he carries with him one day to the grave, a sad memory replayed time and again on progressively longer College Station videoboards as the Aggies fire up student after student with tales of glory. He flings the ball towards the backboard. It drops off the glass and in.
Time still remains, and now we cut back to Buzz Williams’s huddle, where the mad scientist is at work. Somehow, two streams of ink are coming from one dry erase marker. Williams isn’t even holding it. The marker is drawing the play itself. He looks into his men’s eyes. Two words are left to say: “Thank you.”
The play, of course, does work, as well as any play designed to get you the full length of the court in under four seconds without turning the ball over can work. Texas A&M gets a contested-but-not-impossible angle at the hoop. Tyrese Radford hoists it towards the rim and…
It clanks up, then away. Xavier turns around briefly, terrified of a whistle and a referee’s hand, but there is no whistle here. There is no hand here. There is only joy now. Only dreams fulfilled. Only a lifetime of triumph, well-earned. There are hugs. There are so many hugs. There are so many gosh-darn hugs.
Back in Cincinnati, TV’s flicker in nursing homes where the elderly weep with joy, and parents hug their sleepy children tight. “This will mean something one day, Jimmy,” says a mom whose toddler will grow up to score twelve points in a middle school b-game once and think about it happily now and then for the rest of his life. In Madison Square Garden, Hayes is pulled aside by ESPN sideline reporter Myron Medcalf for an interview, then moves away to embrace his brother and his mother. Later, in a quiet moment as they prepare to cut the net, he looks to the rafters, but the man in the suit is not there. He reaches into his pocket, and the watch is gone, too. Inside, though, there’s a note.
“Well done, NIT Friend. It was you all along. -Al”
We kill the music.
