COLLEGE BASKETBALL / NCAA MEN’S FINAL FOUR : Wolverines Win in Overtime Again

They have fallen behind and come back. They have built big leads and lost them. The Michigan Wolverines have been living on the edge, cramming a season’s worth of emotions into three weeks of basketball, and yet they are alive to tell about it, loudly.

The Wolverines claimed a spot in the NCAA tournament championship game for the second consecutive year Saturday with an 81-78 overtime victory over Kentucky. With 64,151 in the Superdome hanging on every possession down the stretch, Michigan scored the final six points in overtime to topple the Wildcats, a team that had defeated its four previous opponents in the tournament by an average of 31 points.

It was merely another night at the gym for the Wolverines. They had trailed in the second half of their three previous tournament games, and Saturday was no different.

They have been branded as underachievers, but they are one of two teams still playing.

“I watched that ESPN show where the coaches all picked us to lose,” Wolverine forward Chris Webber said. “I’m just happy we won.”

Michigan will play North Carolina in the championship game Monday night, a return to the stage for the Wolverines’ five sophomore starters. Last year, as freshmen, they were defeated by Duke, 71-51.

Monday’s game will also mark the second meeting this season between Michigan and North Carolina. In the first game, played in Honolulu in December, the Wolverines were 79-78 winners.

As has often been the case this season for Michigan (31-4), winning Saturday meant getting the ball into the hands of the 6-foot-9 Webber. He scored 27 points on 10-for-17 shooting--including a baseline drive for the go-ahead points with 39 seconds left in overtime--contributed 13 rebounds and swatted away a pass to clinch the victory.

“There are not that many people as strong as him in college basketball,” Michigan center Juwan Howard said. “We knew our big advantage was getting the ball inside.”

Kentucky’s meal ticket for most of the night was All-American forward Jamal Mashburn, who scored 26 points. But he fouled out with 3:23 remaining in overtime, putting the Wildcats in a huge bind.

Kentucky had previously lost its best defender, guard Dale Brown, when he injured his shoulder diving for a loose ball with 6:13 remaining in the game. Brown jammed his right shoulder against a post supporting a press table and was unable to return to the game.

More trouble for the Wildcats came when freshman starter Jared Prickett picked up his fifth foul 24 seconds into overtime.

The result of all this adversity was a grab bag of a lineup on the floor for the Wildcats in the final minutes of overtime.

“We kept fighting and fighting, but we lost key players,” Kentucky Coach Rick Pitino said.

Asked how Kentucky looked without Mashburn, a junior who has announced that he will make himself eligible for this year’s NBA draft, Howard said: “Like night and day. Mashburn is an All-American, probably going to be one of the top five picks in the draft. You see a guy like that go down, it hurts them.”

Also pivotal for Michigan was the way the Wolverines cut off Kentucky’s three-point shooting. Hounded much of the game by Michigan’s Jimmy King, Wildcat point guard Travis Ford, who had sizzled from three-point range in Kentucky’s two previous games, failed to score in the first half and finished with 12 points on three-for-10 shooting, two of six on three-pointers.

The Wolverines held a five-point halftime lead and opened it to 11 at 52-41 with 13:30 to play.

But then Kentucky (30-4) climbed back into the game. A 13-2 run by the Wildcats made it a 54-54 game with 9:20 left.

Webber scored inside to put Michigan up by two with a minute left in regulation, but Ford came back with two free throws to forge a tie with 10 seconds showing.

Michigan worked the ball into point guard Jalen Rose’s hands for a final shot with three seconds left. But his leaning shot from the free-throw line, launched through the arms of Kentucky center Rodney Dent, rolled off the rim. Overtime.

The Wildcats outscored Michigan, 5-2, in the first two minutes of overtime, Mashburn scoring on a putback and a free throw.

Then, however, Kentucky hit the wall. With 3:23 showing, Mashburn bumped Howard as the Michigan center worked the ball near the free-throw line at the Michigan end--foul No. 5 for Mashburn.

“We had to fight a lot of adversity, had to stretch,” Pitino said. “We had to play a lot of people we usually don’t play. We thought with Mashburn in we could win. We thought we had a victory and let it slip away.”

Kentucky kept its three-point cushion until the final minute, when the Wolverines took control.

Ray Jackson scored on a drive and was fouled by Gimel Martinez. Jackson missed the free throw, but the Wolverines, as is their style, kept the ball alive. Result: Webber’s sprint down the baseline for his basket with 39 seconds left.

Next, Dent missed underneath for Kentucky, and Martinez fouled Rose, who made both his free throws with 21 seconds left--Wolverines by three.

After Martinez missed a three-pointer with five seconds showing, the Wildcats wound up with the ball out of bounds under their own basket. But Webber blocked Dent’s inbound pass and Michigan was going back to the championship game.

“We’ve been there before,” Howard said later, looking ahead to Monday. “That’s going to help us in a lot of ways. One thing it’ll do is make us feel like ‘Hey, we can’t lose here again.’ We don’t want to be like the Portland Trail Blazers.”