MINNEAPOLIS — Virginia, a fine tortoise of an app with a warmish 114-year history, a knack for deliberative basketball and also an unthinkable splat of 13 months ago, spent Monday night scaling the last jagged rungs into a pinnacle. When finally it made the closing, painful steps in overtime, reached the very top and looked around, it knew a feeling associated only with other people such as Duke or North Carolina, the neighboring hares that always left it among the overshadowed.
It was the first first-time men’s college basketball national champion in 13 decades, and could see back across the landscape of one hell of a story. It could see Texas Tech, the finalist Virginia outlasted from 85-77 in that overtime, a team so great it had hit on the NCAA tournament like a fantastic wind coming off the large plains of Lubbock, felling Michigan State, Gonzaga, Michigan and Buffalo.
Gaze back from up high, and Virginia may see the carnival of drama that helped it wriggle from doom in life-shortening matches against Purdue, Auburn and Texas Tech. Squint harder, and it could observe back to March 2018, when Virginia became the first No. 1 seed in tournament history to lose to a No. 16 seed, a bewildering 74-54 thud against Maryland Baltimore County, the nadir of a five decades of tortured Marches. Yet right in the front, it might observe the droves in orange and blue in U.S. Bank Stadium, reveling as sound cascaded from lovers who rarely dared dream of such a thing.
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