23 Years Ago

23 years ago tonight, the greatest April Fool’s joke in college basketball history was made in Lexington, Kentucky.

 

Villanova 66

Georgetown 64

 

Davidson’s improbable run to the Final Eight gave Villanova’s championship some visibility this weekend as CBS was constantly putting up the graph of the lowest seeded teams to make the Final Four: LSU in ’86, Wisconsin, George Mason, a N. Carolina 8 seed. But only the 8^th seeded Villanova Wildcats actually made the Final Four and won it all.

 

Perhaps even more incredible than their near perfect game versus the defending champion Hoyas, was their run through the tourney to get to that point. Barely surviving Dayton, they shocked #1 seeded Michigan, than got through Maryland and met the #2 seed North Carolina in the regional final. They caught a bracket break by getting Memphis State in the national semi-final instead of either of their Big East rivals, G’town and St. John’s, that were left to duke it out themselves. Indeed, though Memphis St. was a #2 seed, they were still the weakest of Villanova’s possible opponents given that the two Big East schools were one seeds.

 

Really, Villanova’s win was the culmination of my college basketball fandom. Oh to be a young college basketball fan in Philly back then. It started with Penn’s surprising Final Four showing in 1979, carried through to St. Joe’s shocking upset of DePaul in the 1982 tourney and crystallized with ‘Nova’s national championship in 1985. For anyone that followed college basketball or attended a game at the Palestra, it was reaching the summit of a very steep mountain.

 

Oddly enough, I got my acceptance letter to Villanova on this same day,