NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: KANSAS 83, OKLAHOMA 79 : Manning Got Just What He Wanted by Staying at Kansas

When it was really, finally, absolutely over, Danny Manning jumped higher than anyone, which hardly should have been a surprise.

He has, after all, done that before.

This time, it was different. This time he didn’t jump to grab a rebound or to swat away a shot, but in celebration.

His Kansas team, which last year hung in suspense while Manning decided whether to turn professional, had won the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. basketball championship, accomplishing the thing that had hung in his mind and helped to keep him from leaving.

Manning, who has an uncanny ability for knowing when a game has been decided, began his own mental celebration a bit earlier than the end of the game, when he stood at the foul line with five seconds left.

Kansas’ lead was just two points at the time, but Manning said later he was thinking only this: “It’s over.”

After he made both shots, one would presume?

“Before,” he said.

It was not the greatest performance of his career, but it was the most important, and it was one that made his father, Ed Manning, a Kansas assistant coach, most proud.

“I’m proud of the way he played, and I’m proud of the way he grew up. He learned to be a leader, and learned to be responsible,” Ed Manning said.

Manning, scored 31 points and pulled down 18 rebounds--that number a career-high. He also had five steals, two blocked shots and two assists. And now he has that national title, something that seemed so remote less than a month ago that Manning conceded he was “ready to move on . . . looking for something else.”

Which is not to say that he didn’t believe it possible, but only that he understood the odds against the Jayhawks. After the game, he had a message to deliver.

“For anyone involved in a championship of any kind,” he said, “keep your head up. It can happen. To all the people who said it couldn’t be done--look at us now.”

Plenty of people had already done their looking, among them Stacey King, the Oklahoma player who too often found himself looking at Manning’s back.

King, no slouch of an athlete himself, more than once found himself up in the air, fooled by a pump fake or just flat beaten, as Manning would already be around him on his way to the basket.

“I knew he wanted it bad,” King said. “He came out and proved he wanted it bad.”

Manning, the player Larry Brown says is the best he has ever been associated with--and that’s saying something--ended his college career with 2,951 points, the sixth-highest total in Division I history.

His double-double in the championship game was his 15th of the season and his second of the Final Four, but such figures meant little to Manning.

“This is a great feeling, a well-deserved feeling,” Manning said. “This wasn’t a gift. Our opponents were prepared, but we capitalized on all of them.”

One of the more enduring images of the championship game may be of Manning standing above the top of the key, holding the ball on his hip, a 6-10 player in charge of a game. Oklahoma, that running, gunning team was standing still looking at Manning, who himself brought the ball up the court many times. Those ball-hawking Oklahoma guards flustered Kansas’ own guards, but the Sooner big men were no threat to Manning.

Even so, despite his many spectacular plays--that length-of-the-court drive, those leaning jump shots, the spectacular left-handed half-hook--Manning was not in complete control the whole way. Twice in the last three minutes, Manning took his man one-on-one, drove to the basket and forced up bank shots that bounded away. He had tried to do too much.

“I looked over and Coach was jumping up and down shouting, ‘Slow down, slow down,’ ” Manning said.

After that, he did.

“I knew Danny was mad at himself,” Chris Piper said. “But I knew he would make something happen.”

Manning knew it, too.

“I was excited. I tried to do too much,” Manning said.

Manning’s teammates had no problem with that.

“With Danny, you know somehow he’s always going to find a way,” said Piper, also a senior.

One of the ways was staying at Kansas for his last year, something his parents both had wanted.

“Once you leave college basketball you can’t come back,” Ed Manning said. “He made the right decision. The right decision.”

How clear that is now.

“Something like this,” Danny Manning said, “you really work for it.”

After the game, father and son met to congratulate each other. Ed Manning, who said he was a coach on the bench, was a father again.

“He came up after the game to congratulate me and we gave each other a hug and he said something like, ‘you really deserve it. You worked for it.’ ”

That he did.

“He has the ability to score, to pass, to dribble, to shoot, he’s one blessed with gifts,” Ed Manning said. “But he does have a tendency to relax a bit, things come so easy for him.”

Not this time. Not easily.