COLLEGE BASKETBALL / NCAA MEN’S CHAMPIONSHIP GAME : An Ending No One Expected

Never in a million years or a billion bounced basketballs did the distinguished old coach in the dark blue suit or the relative babies in powder-blue piping by his side suspect that a championship would be theirs without a shot being fired, without a rebound being ripped down, without a pass being thrown or a personal foul being called.

As they sat to the side of Dean Smith in a hall filled with 64,151, with their eyelids shut tight and their hands intertwined, waiting to see what Chris Webber of Michigan would do next, it never dawned on any of these players that their team’s 38th game of a very long season and the 997th game of their coach’s career would ultimately be won by somebody calling a timeout, much less a timeout called by the other team.

Winner, by technical knockout, North Carolina.

The story of an entire season obviously does not revolve around one final score--not even this one, North Carolina 77, Michigan 71--nor does it spin on one single technicality, as the winning coach, Smith, made such an effort to emphasize here Monday night, saying: “I don’t think that timeout necessarily won the game for North Carolina or lost the game for Michigan.”

Yet, forever and ever, when Tar Heels young and old and neutral observers of college basketball everywhere discuss this one moment from the 1993 NCAA tournament title game--and, believe you me, they will--references will be made to it as the play that did indeed save the day for North Carolina, a team too good to need much help, but grateful all the same for the astonishing help that it got.

“We might not be the best team, but we’re the NCAA champs,” Smith went so far as to say.

In all his 62 years, the man for whom a dome back home is named was under the impression that he had seen practically everything there was to see on a basketball floor. Not true. Not true any more than surprises might be in store for Smith at the next Final Four, which, as it happens, will assemble in an arena in Charlotte in his home state.

Twice now, Smith has taken home national championships from New Orleans, a coincidence that encouraged his 7-foot center, Eric Montross, to make jokes after Monday’s game about moving the UNC campus here permanently.

Smith said, “I don’t care if they play it here or in Detroit or in Brooklyn or where,” because when games like these are played, they belong to the whole world.

This one went back and forth, forth and back, dominated mostly by a Tar Heel team that, 38 games into the season, still seemed to be trying to persuade people that it might very well be this nation’s best. The heretofore rarely publicized backcourt bomber Donald Williams kept dropping payload after payload, and a nothing-fancy senior forward named George Lynch kept stacking up double-doubles, points and rebounds, game after game after game.

But everyone had a hand in this one for North Carolina, including, when things really got down to the nitty-gritty, 6-8 forward Pat Sullivan, who might as well have been the invisible man for all the notice he had gained before this. The ball, and for that matter the game, was in Sullivan’s hands with 20 seconds to play and the Tar Heels clinging to a one-point lead.

Sullivan is a sometimes timid boy from New Jersey who once, when asked to mention an interesting little-known fact about himself, said that his nickname was “Self.”

Well, when Self Sullivan stepped to the line with a chance to become a hero, before he popped the first free throw into the center of the net, he took a long look and longer listen at the Michigan player Jalen Rose, who, as usual, was jabbering away, attempting to distract the opposition. For Sullivan, that was the last act of a desperate man and a desperate team.

“Rose started saying, ‘Watch it now, this is for the national championship,’ ” Sullivan said. “I said to myself: ‘I have to make this, for my team, for my school and for myself, for all the hard work that’s gone into this.’ ”

Only the first of his two free throws was good, but Sullivan knew that the Wolverines were done. They never scored again, in fact, and it was Sullivan who jumped highest when Webber called for the phantom timeout that squandered Michigan’s last chance. It was time, all right--time to crown the best team in college basketball, 1993.