A Night to Remember for Arizona’s Simon

They all come to this one night wanting it to be about them. They all want to make the shots, have the ball in their hands at the end, have their sport be about them for this one Monday when everybody watches. The way it was for Michael Jordan on this Monday once, or a sharpshooter from Indiana University named Keith Smart.

Now it was about Arizona’s Miles Simon in the RCA Dome. In the last seconds of overtime, he ended up with the ball one last time under the Kentucky basket, and knelt down, and heard the horn, and put his forehead to the court, and let the last of the NCAA final cover him like a blanket.

He had scored 30 points against the defending champions of college basketball. He had done this with flair, without fear, along with a freshman guard named Mike Bibby. They had not been scared off by Kentucky, they had not been trapped by Kentucky in the backcourt. Instead they had outshot them and out-thought them and finally taken their title. It was 84-79 for Arizona, and Simon had the ball and he wasn’t going to give it up until a few minutes before midnight, before March Madness became April, before college basketball gave the stage in sports over to baseball.

But it was not baseball season now in the RCA Dome for Simon, the MVP of the Final Four, a junior who had started the season ineligible. It was all the college basketball season anybody could ever want. Miles Simon had played one of those finals that will be remembered. Arizona, having beaten Kansas and beaten North Carolina and now Kentucky -- No. 1 seeds all -- had become one of those unlikely underdog champions who will be remembered.

It wasn’t N.C. State over Houston and it wasn’t Villanova over Georgetown that time. But for Arizona, it was close enough.

“We’re here now,” Miles Simon was saying now on the court, ball under his arm, talking about an Arizona team that does not have a single senior on it. “We’re not a year away.”

Sometimes it is just your time in sports, no matter how young you are, no matter how famous the other team is. Kentucky had all the tradition, it had Rick Pitino, it had the title. Arizona had Miles Simon and Mike Bibby, two kids trying to win the NCAA title all by themselves. They thought they had the game won at the end of overtime, until Anthony Epps of Kentucky made a brave three-point shot that rocked the RCA Dome, rocked Arizona. They had to keep playing. It was 74-74 and the season wasn’t over yet.

It was over in overtime because Kentucky couldn’t shoot straight and had to keep fouling, and Simon and everybody else who had to kept making free throws. Maybe there will be another overtime sometime when a team doesn’t have to score a basket to win the NCAA championship. That is how it played out in Indianapolis, all the way until Miles Simon was moving around after the buzzer with the basketball he’d beaten Kentucky with under his arms.

He would finally give it up to his coach, Lute Olson. Only to Olson. Before that, they gave him championship caps and championship T-shirts. Miles Simon carried it all like a champ. But then it had been that kind of night. He made pull-up jumpers, he beat Kentucky down the court with the ball when Bibby wasn’t doing the same. Maybe Arizona gave up the ball once in the backcourt all night long. There were only 18 turnovers for the game.

“These kids don’t scare very easily,” Lute Olson said.

They never scared in this tournament, from the time they were 10 points down to South Alabama in the first round with around six minutes left. After that, you could not stop them. They were the quickest team in the tournament, quicker than Kentucky, one of the quickest college champions you will ever see.

Now it was over and Simon’s family had pressed down to the front row of seats and his sister Charisse, married to Darryl Strawberry, was giving her husband a play-by-play over a cell phone.

“Oh God,” Charisse yelled into her cell phone, “they just named Miles MVP, too.”

On the phone from his Seattle hotel room, Darryl Strawberry said, “I kept talking to Miles early in the season (when Simon missed 11 games because of his grades) and told him to stay strong, to stay in there, because everything that happens in life happens for a reason.”

In a few minutes, after the presentation of the championship trophy to Olson, Simon got loose from security the way he kept getting loose against Kentucky. He had come from off the team to the top of the world. He came over to his family, and his sister handed him the phone.

“Darryl!” Miles Simon yelled, above all the music and noise and tumult of his Monday night. “What is going on?”

Later he would laugh and say, “How’s your night going so far?”

Then Simon’s grandma was hugging him and he was passing out those caps and T-shirts and hugging his sister. Charisse Strawberry, who knows all about hard times, kept giving the play-by-play to her husband.

She was asked if she ever thought her brother’s season could end like this after the way it began.

“Even people who loved him never could have dreamed this ending,” she said.

She handed over the phone. Now Darryl Strawberry said this from Seattle:

“I didn’t have to tell him dreams can come true. All he had to do was look at me.”

While Miles Simon was telling everyone, “This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever done.”

He had help. Bibby, who started slow, had 19 points, nine rebounds, total control of the Kentucky press. When he got the ball, the press was over. Bennett Davison and Donnell Harris got the rebounds down the stretch. Everybody seemed to hit big free throws.

But this was Simon’s show the way Saturday was Bibby’s show. It was only fitting he ended up with the ball at the end. He had taken everything else from Kentucky. Why not that? Across the RCA Dome, his sister kept describing the scene to Darryl Strawberry. But he had seen it before, of course. He knew it from the last Saturday night last October. He knew what the last Monday in March looked like for his brother-in-law. Darryl had seen this dream before.