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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (9407)	3/7/2005 4:31:46 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362514

Perfection reflection suddenly turns fuzzy __________________________ By Rick Morrissey Columnist The Chicago Tribune In The Wake Of The News March 7, 2005 COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Bruce Weber looked like death iced over. The words would come later, and they would be full of resolve, frustration, hope and resignation. But with Ohio State fans and players balled up in a center-court mosh pit, Weber looked stunned, his face drawn and frozen in disbelief as a security detail led him off the floor. The TV guys started taping their stand-up reports in front of those bouncing, jubilant fans, hoping to capture with some immediacy what had just happened. Illinois players escaped from the scrum, some looking dazed, some looking defiant, all of them looking dark and out of place, like a bunch of Goths at a Shriners convention. An Ohio State fan walked around the court with the ubiquitous "John 3:16" poster in his hands, but it really should have read "Matthew 3:5.1" because the Buckeyes' Matt Sylvester had hit a game-winning three-pointer with 5.1 seconds left to destroy Illinois' dream of a perfect season. You'd say the unthinkable had just happened except that lots of people had been predicting since midseason that Illinois would eventually lose. Their prescience arrived by tortoise in the 30th game of the season. Perfection is a messy, dangerous business. Messy because few things go as planned. Dangerous because you don't know the exact price of striving for it. So the question comes hard now: What does a 65-64 loss to Ohio State, its first on the last day of the regular season, mean to a team like Illinois? For those of us who thought there was no gain for the Illini in embracing the idea of a loss before the NCAA tournament, it means we don't have to have that silly debate anymore. For those of us who thought the Illini would go undefeated on the way to the national title, it means the fairy tale has to be edited slightly. The national championship is still the thing, the only thing, and a loss on a Sunday afternoon in early March isn't going to change that. If this team is everything it appeared to be in the previous 29 games—resilient, single-minded and full of heart—Sunday's loss was spilled milk. "Everyone said we need to lose a game, and here's that game," forward Roger Powell said. "Now we don't need to lose anymore." That sort of determination has carried this team all season, that and a three-guard attack that has been murder on opponents. The determination was there at Value City Arena. A search party was needed to find the three-guard attack. Whichever teams face the Illini in the NCAA tournament will commit Sunday's game to memory. Dee Brown, Luther Head and Deron Williams went a combined 7-for-27 from the field. Williams finished with two points. After Brown badly missed a three-pointer with 3 minutes 15 seconds left in the first half, the Ohio State crowd chanted, "Air ball! Air ball!" every time he touched the ball. He didn't make another basket the rest of the game. What it all meant was that, for the first time this season, none of the guards stepped up to help Illinois extract itself from impending doom. Head finished with 12 points, seven rebounds and six assists. A nice game, but not nice enough. The real question is whether Ohio State exposed something about Illinois that hasn't been exposed before. The answer is no. The answer is that the Illini shot 33.3 percent in the second half. The answer is that Ohio State had no turnovers in the second half, and Illinois had seven. The answer is that the Illini did this to themselves. The only thing that was different Sunday was that Sylvester was able to do whatever he wanted with the basketball and with Illinois defenders. He took the ball inside, driving mostly on Williams and James Augustine. The rap on the Illini is that they lack power inside. What Sylvester did was based on quickness. And he was wide open for his game-winner because of a mix-up by the Illini off screens. Very un-Illinois-like. All of what happened Sunday was fixable, basketball-wise and psyche-wise. Illinois' overtime victory over Iowa on Jan. 20 was ugly enough to qualify aesthetically as an Illini loss. But there was good in it, because Illinois seemed to take a deep breath and get back to the business of better basketball. Maybe this loss makes the Illini understand that the business of teamwork is the only business they should be in. Weber was right in saying after the game that his players were guilty of not making the extra pass and of taking some questionable shots. The team we saw Sunday is not the team we saw in the previous 29 games. That team moved the ball so well that it made basketball purists misty-eyed. So what was that we saw Sunday? Nerves? Selfishness? The Sports Illustrated cover jinx at work? No, just a bad day better forgotten. When Powell missed his three-point attempt at the end of the game, it was the proper punctuation on a lousy statement of a game. "It feels like a dream," Sylvester said. "It feels like I'm going to wake up and it's all going to be over." For Illinois, that's the short-term goal. Copyright © 2005, The Chicago Tribune