It reads like a final chapter

OMAHA -- The other players were already milling about, but O.J. Mayo grabbed the ball in the final seconds and gave it a long heave toward the basket.

It was odd, a desperation shot without any desperation.

USC was down by 13.

The buzzer sounded on the Trojans’ 80-67 first-round NCAA tournament loss to Kansas State, and Mayo got the rebound and tried again.

“Yeah, see if I could get a basket to fall,” he said.

USC went one-and-done. Mayo looks as if he will too.

The much-ballyhooed battle of the freshman stars, Mayo and Kansas State’s Michael Beasley, became a battle of teams, and Kansas State won it with contributions from some of its less-heralded freshmen.

Afterward, Mayo slapped hands with the Kansas State players, then found Beasley and his high school teammate Bill Walker and hugged them. They rubbed his head, and Mayo walked off the court, giving a ball boy a high five.

Somebody asked him in the locker room if he had played his last game in a USC uniform.

“I don’t know. I’m not thinking about that right now,” Mayo said.

He handled himself perfectly well, the way he has all season, with yes-sirs and yes-ma’ams and spot-on analysis of the game.

He handled himself, you have to say, like a pro.

“I think they were more aggressive on the boards,” he said. “We knew going into the game we really had to control the defensive glass.”

USC alternated defenses the way most people expected Coach Tim Floyd would, with Daniel Hackett doubling Beasley physically at times with Taj Gibson.

Foul trouble and the Trojans kept Beasley under wraps for a while, but he still muscled his way to 23 points and 11 rebounds, and Walker carried the Wildcats to a 10-point halftime lead by scoring 17 of his 22 before halftime.

“When you’ve got a one-two punch like that and pay a lot of attention to one player -- when you have two good players like that, inside and out, it’s kind of tough,” said Mayo, who finished with 20 points on six-for-16 shooting and had five assists.

He sat there in the locker room, his arms crossed, matter of fact.

Someone asked him to sum up his feelings.

“I’m mad that we lost,” Mayo said, and smiled in a not-unfriendly way. “Is that good enough?”

He seemed not that different from the way he did when USC lost to Mercer in the opening game of the season. Disappointed, but not devastated. It was as if this were a summer tournament, and there were more games to play.

Or, you could say, it was as if it were one of 82.

Sure, Mayo could decide to stay. He mentioned the future in the locker room, but players often do that before they turn pro.

“I’m not used to being in this type of situation. First round, we lost,” he said. “We’ve got to regroup, in the spring and summer, and get better.”

But if he does leave, has USC’s foray into the new one-and-done world of college basketball been worth it?

Mayo was less spectacular than expected, but he went from a gifted gunner to a player who passed the ball more, turned it over less, and played more within the framework of the game.

Some coaches think one-year players are terrible for the college game. At a minimum, they wish the NBA and NCAA could conspire to make players stay two years if they came at all.

Floyd doesn’t have a problem with the freshmen who are expected to move on.

“If we’re going to look back on this year, we’re going to say it was the year of the freshmen,” he said the day before the game. “And understand that we’re seeing guys that up until a year ago, with [Greg] Oden and [Kevin] Durant, that we would not have seen from 1995 on, that would have been in the [NBA] without a doubt.

“Some of these guys are going to move on. Some of them are going to find out they need another year. So the college game is going to benefit from that.”

As for Mayo’s impact at USC, Floyd pointed to attendance at the Galen Center, up from 5,798 a game last season to 9,647 this season.

“I think a lot of that has been because of the interest in O.J. Mayo,” he said. “My hope is people have come into the building to watch O.J. and in the meantime have fallen in love with SC basketball and will come back again. So has it been good for our program, yes.

“It will be a detriment if and when O.J. leaves if he’s not academically eligible and costs us a scholarship. That would be something that would make me review whether or not to give another guy like this an opportunity at some point.

“He has helped us with our future recruiting, and, like I said, some of these guys who perceive themselves to be NBA players who might have made mistakes in leaving a year ago are going to find out they need another year or two.”

Somebody asked Mayo again if that final heave was his last shot as a Trojan.

“I don’t know. We just now lost the game,” he said, and he smiled again.

“It felt like it ended pretty fast.”

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robyn.norwood@latimes.com