The Last Dance

Kentucky again. Isn’t it always?

Seems like no matter what, Utah eventually turns a corner and runs smack-dab into Kentucky in the NCAA tournament.

OK, so not every year.

Only three years in a row, and four of the last six.

Even when Utah won the NCAA title, way back in 1944, the Utes actually lost to Kentucky in the National Invitation Tournament, became a late addition to the NCAA tournament and then won the whole thing, without having to beat--you guessed it--Kentucky.

So when the NCAA pairings came out March 8, Utah center Michael Doleac took one look at the brackets and saw where Utah would meet Kentucky this time.

In tonight’s national championship game at the Alamodome.

“This is another chance at them,” said Doleac, whose team has beaten two No. 1-seeded teams, Arizona and North Carolina, in its last two games. The Utes might as well tack on a victory against the program that has won more games than any school in history.

“We never knew how far we could come,” Doleac said. “But now we have a shot.”

Make that another shot.

Last year, Kentucky beat Utah, 72-59, in the West Regional final, leading by only three at halftime but holding Keith Van Horn to 15 points in the game.

The year before, a dominant Kentucky team on its way to the NCAA title beat Utah, 101-70, in a regional semifinal.

In 1993, before any of this team’s players were at Utah, it was an 83-62 Utah loss, in the second round.

“The first time, you know, we really didn’t have time to think about what was going on because we were losing by 30 or 40 points,” said Andre Miller, the point guard from Compton who shredded North Carolina’s late-game press almost single-handedly in Utah’s victory Saturday.

“The first time we played Kentucky, I was basically a spectator watching Antoine Walker and Tony Delk showcase their talents,” Miller said.

“The second game, we had a chance, but we had some lapses and didn’t have the defensive players to go out and shut Ron Mercer down.

“But this year, we are definitely better defensively and a better rebounding team.”

Utah is a different team, and so is Kentucky. Delk, Walker and Mercer are gone, replaced with a deep and balanced team that Utah matches up with well.

It will be Doleac and Nazr Mohammed inside, Miller and Wayne Turner at the point, and stables of big, versatile forwards going at each other.

But no one, it seems, that Utah can’t stay with.

“Boy, the main thing I remember about those Kentucky games was we lost. That’s about all you need to know,” said Doleac, whose persistent, physical defense on North Carolina’s Antawn Jamison frustrated the national player of the year Saturday and took him off his game.

“My sophomore year, it was more like we were watching Kentucky play instead of being in the game. I never thought we were in the game, even from the opening tip. That might have been the only time the game was still in question, before the opening tip.

“My junior year, it was a lot different. We could play with those guys. We did play with them. And then at the end, we wound up losing the game. It was a bad memory, especially getting knocked out of the tournament.”

Now Kentucky is the last team left with a chance to knock out Utah, a big, disciplined team with one of the nation’s best defenses.

The Utes are the tallest team in the country, averaging a little over 6 feet 5, with a front line of Doleac, Hanno Mottola and Alex Jensen that averages 6-8.

They are good rebounders--look at Miller, the point guard who has 28 rebounds in his last two games--because they block out well. The statistics bear that out. Utah led the nation in rebounding margin, outrebounding opponents by more than 10 a game.

But more than anything, it is that defense.

Utah held Arizona to a season-low 51 points, 40 below its average.

The Utes held North Carolina to 59, and the Tar Heels’ 22 points at halftime marked their second-lowest scoring half all season. The other was 21 points, against Princeton.

No Utah opponent has shot better than 50% all season, and in five NCAA tournament games, opponents are shooting 39%.

Kentucky must worry about a triangle-and-two or a sloughing man-to-man that dares any bad shooters to shoot, but most of all, it must worry about which of Utah’s several effective defenses it will be.

“Even I don’t know what we’re going to start out in yet,” Utah Coach Rick Majerus said. “If Kentucky guesses right, that doesn’t make much difference because we’re going to change every time anyway.”

The only thing that doesn’t seem to change about the NCAA title game lately is Kentucky playing in it.

“It’s mind-boggling. Almost incomprehensible, that you could play in three of these games consecutively,” Majerus said.

But in a run reminiscent of the way Arizona went through Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky to win the NCAA title last season, Utah has knocked off two of college basketball’s premier programs and has the last shot at the third.

And it isn’t as if Utah has never beaten Kentucky.

In 1947, Utah won the NIT, then still a competitor with the NCAA because of its tradition at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

The result in the championship game was Utah 49, Kentucky 45.

The only other win in a 2-5 series was in 1976, a 70-58 Utah victory.

“Isn’t that ironical?” said Arnie Ferrin, the former Utah athletic director who once chaired the NCAA selection committee and played for the Utes in the 1940s.

“Everybody will write that they’ve nailed us three times, but we do have a history of beating them. You just have to go back.”

You have to go back to the tragedy of 1944, when Utah won the NCAA championship after being added to the field because of an accident involving the Arkansas team.

Utah had started the postseason in the NIT, but was called on to replace Arkansas after the Razorbacks were forced to withdraw.

“It was a terrible accident,” Ferrin said. “The team was traveling, and I think they were on a mountain road and had a flat tire around a curve. A couple of them went in back and were hit. I can’t remember if someone was killed, but someone lost a leg.”

The Utah team, which had traveled three days by train from Salt Lake City to New York for its NIT loss to Kentucky, traveled two days back to Kansas City to play in the NCAA regional, then two days back to New York for the NCAA final against Dartmouth, and three days by train home, a staggering 10 days by rail.

“The newspapers didn’t even send anyone with us, and they hired a play-by-play man in New York to do the radio,” Ferrin said.

“But we won, 42-40, and I think we were strong defensively, just like this team. We had players who went on to be doctors and engineers, and this team has a future doctor and a Rhodes scholar candidate.

“But our coach told us you couldn’t shoot the ball unless both feet were on the floor and you were squared up to the basket. . . . I think he’d turn over in his grave should he watch Antawn Jamison.”

Nobody can watch Jamison tonight. He’s through.

It’s Utah and Kentucky.

One more time around.