2013 NCAA Final 4 Atlanta Is Here !

New York - In this, the strangest of college basketball seasons, the makeup of the four teams left in the N.C.A.A. men’s tournament seems almost scripted, in a perfectly nonscripted sort of way. Go ahead, try and make some sense of it. There is one national player of the year candidate remaining, Trey Burke of Michigan. There is one No. 1 seed remaining, Louisville. There is one old-guard Big East team, Syracuse, before the conference as we know it disbands and the Orange leave basketball tradition for football dollars. And there is one outlier, the Wichita State Shockers, their glorious mascot WuShock in tow. Welcome to Parityville. Congratulations to the four of you who
correctly predicted this Final Four in your office pool. Now please go see a mental health professional. Or fly to Las Vegas. Of course the 2012-13 college basketball season unfolded this way at the end, after all the chaos and the upsets and the curse the No. 1 ranking carried. The national semifinals on Saturday night in Atlanta feature a clear favorite (Louisville) that did not become so until March and three challengers that could qualify as moderate surprises if they won the national championship. What these teams taught us over the past two weeks is that basketball games in February mean little when the calendar turns to March. Michigan went 3-4 in February and tumbled from the top national ranking to the fifth seed in the Big Ten tournament. Syracuse went 4-4 that month and lost three games in March before the N.C.A.A. tournament started. Wichita State lost three straight from Jan. 29 to Feb. 5: against Indiana State, at Northern Iowa, at Southern Illinois, not a powerhouse among them. Louisville, of course, went 6-1 in February, its only loss to Notre Dame in five overtimes. That defeat marked the lone blemish in a two-month stretch in which the Cardinals dismantled all challengers, capturing the Big East tournament and speeding toward the national semifinals with four drubbings won by an average of nearly 22 points. In this season of tumult near the top of the rankings, Louisville, save for a three-game losing streak, proved remarkably consistent. After the Cardinals overwhelmed Duke in the Midwest Region final, Coach Mike Krzyzewski told reporters that Louisville “can boom you.” “That’s what they do to teams,” he added. The Cardinals will try to advance — as they did Sunday night — without guard Kevin Ware, who sustained a broken leg in the Duke game that ranked among the most gruesome sports injuries ever televised. It was an inspiring scene when the Cardinals carried out his jersey for the postgame celebration. Speaking of booming foes, Wichita State took out the top two seeds to win the West Region, Gonzaga and Ohio State. This will mark the Shockers’ first Final Four appearance since 1965 and the first time a Missouri Valley Conference team made the national semifinals since Larry Bird led Indiana State in 1979. Should Wichita State upend Louisville, it would register much shock value. Perhaps, though, it should not. One of the so-called midmajors has advanced to the Final Four in three of the past four seasons, and Butler made the championship game twice. Wichita State did not luck its way through upsets over the Zags and the Buckeyes. It withstood late runs by both teams, played more physical than both teams and snagged more than 40 offensive rebounds in four tournament contests. Those second chances will keep a team in most games. Expect to hear a lot about the Shockers’ rebounding prowess this week. Same as with Syracuse’s (insert laudatory word here) 2-3 zone (suggestions: vaunted, celebrated, trademarked). In its four N.C.A.A. tournament games, the Orange held each opponent to fewer than 60 points. Two opponents scored fewer than 40 points. Expect to hear about Burke, too, the best player remaining in the tournament. He staged a comeback against Kansas with a deep 3-pointer from way behind the left wing that helped force overtime. He helped slay Florida to propel Michigan into the Final Four for the first time since 1993. (Expect a few Fab Five retrospectives as well.) Mostly, though, college basketball fans should expect the most unpredictable of outcomes. That is how this season has unfolded, how this N.C.A.A. tournament has unfolded. They should expect Florida Gulf Coast to capture the attention of the nation. They should expect Harvard to bludgeon New Mexico. They should expect La Salle, winner of a first-four game earlier in the tournament, to advance to the regional semifinals. They should expect Southern, a No. 16 seed, to challenge Gonzaga. With that logic as the baseline for a forecast, there is no logic in predicting what will happen on Saturday and Monday in Atlanta. Best guesses are just that. Thus we present your 2013 N.C.A.A. tournament champion: the Wichita State Shockers. In this, the strangest of college basketball seasons, that ending would not be strange. It would be fitting.