SAN ANTONIO – Forty-five minutes after the confetti started falling on somebody else, 45 minutes into what should have been their celebration, 45 minutes into a nightmare they will relive in one way or another for the rest of their lives, the door to the Houston locker room finally opened.
A few players sat at their lockers with towels over their heads. Houston’s assistant coaches mostly sat quietly, sobbing. Somewhere in the back, a curling scream and a loud collision could be heard. Reporters swarmed guard Terrance Arceneaux, but he was still struggling to find the right words to say.
The scene after a team loses a national championship game is never pretty. But this one was particularly brutal because it was imbued with the regret of a team that spent more than two hours Monday night winning the game, never considering the possibility of any other outcome, and then suddenly being forced to confront the horror show that unfolded.
“All year, this team has been so good at winning ugly, winning tight, tough, close, gritty games,” said Kellen Sampson, the lead assistant for his father, Kelvin. “Somebody all year has always just kind of stepped up and made the play and got us to the finish line. That’s usually winning time for us.”
“I’m sorry, y’all, my head’s spinning,” said Joseph Tugler, the starting forward who was limited to fewer than 16 minutes due to foul trouble. “Man, bro. It was right there. Right there. Two points.”
Emanuel Sharp was nowhere to be found, but how could you blame him?
All things considered, he’s probably been Houston’s best player: A knockdown three-point shooter, a quintessential Houston guard who can play on or off the ball and the guy you want guarding the other team’s best ballhandler.
But in the championship game, Sharp was edgy and sluggish on offense, forcing shots that weren’t there and struggling to generate looks for anyone else. Maybe it was nerves. Perhaps the strain of trying to slow down Florida’s Walter Clayton Jr., – and successfully so, for most of the game – ate away at his energy.
Whatever the reason, Sharp had the ball in his hands on the two biggest possessions of the game. The first, with Houston trailing for the first time since the early minutes of the first half, he dribbled into a mess of baseline traffic and lost the ball off his leg.
And then, with Houston needing a two to tie or a three to win, Sharp got a clean-enough look from the top of the key. But instead of letting it fly like a great shooter does, he saw Clayton flying at him on a closeout and hesitated for just a split second as he sprung off the ground and dropped the ball.
Sharp immediately realized he had made a massive mistake. Because he had already launched into his shooting motion, he couldn’t touch the ball or it would be a double-dribble. In retrospect, that would have been better because Houston could have at least fouled with a few seconds left or tried to get a turnover on the inbounds pass. But in that quick moment of chaos where instinct takes over, Sharp backed away from the ball, a scramble ensued and Florida won the championship without Houston ever getting a final shot.
“It was great execution, I just wish we got a shot up,” senior guard Mylik Wilson said. “Man, the job (Sharp) did on Clayton in the first half as a group, and him especially, nobody holds a player like that to zero points. You can’t blame the game on one play. You just gotta credit them. They made better plays down the stretch than us. I mean, they won.”
As the referees signaled the end of the game and Florida’s bench ran onto the floor in celebration, Sharp just crouched down near the spot where he lost the ball for the final time. He put his face in his jersey and his hands over his eyes. Teammates Milos Uzan and Ja’Vier Francis tried to console him. Tugler came to pat him on the back. Even Clayton left Florida’s celebration for a moment and whispered something in his ear.
It took Sharp more than a minute to finally get to his feet, and then he bent down again, arms on knees, until more teammates hugged and finally pulled him off the floor as his left hand pinched the top of his lip.
“He’s a really, really good player who’s awesome at reading closeouts,” Kellen Sampson said. “It just didn’t go his way.”
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You can quibble with the way Houston approached that final sequence – clearly, the Cougars should have gone more quickly with 19 seconds left in hopes of generating multiple opportunities or one of their signature offensive rebounds.
But in the end, the Cougars let a championship slip away because their best players shot poorly – Sharp 3-for-11, senior J’Wan Roberts 3-for-13 and Uzan 2-for-9 – and because a team that hadn’t lost a game in regulation since Nov. 9 simply couldn’t execute under pressure the way it had so many times before.
What explains a program built on defense and execution failing to put a hammer lock on the game after building an 11-point lead with 14:07 left? What explains five turnovers in the final 3:24? What explains being unable to get a shot off on the final two possessions?
Was it the moment? Was it Florida’s relentlessness? Was it simply fate for a program that lost a championship in equally brutal fashion 42 years ago when NC State scored the winning bucket at the buzzer?
Houston will have to live with those questions for a long time, because that’s the cruelty of this tournament: You only get one chance.
“Incomprehensible in that situation we couldn’t get a shot,” Kelvin Sampson said. “We got good looks, but Florida was doing a good job running us off the line and forcing us to score it. We just didn’t do a very good job of finishing some shots. At the end you’ve got to get a shot. Got to do better than that.”
When you come so close to winning this tournament and walk away empty-handed, there are endless what-ifs but only one reality that matters. There’s no time limit on that kind of pain.