Foreword to March: Every Game Counts

Oregon and Kansas, the participants in today’s NCAA Midwest Regional final, are proof that the regular season matters.

Oregon, Pacific 10 champion, and Kansas, Big 12 champion, developed during the course of the season the kind of quiet confidence, the good habits, the belief in their ability to do the right thing at the right time that serves teams well as the opponents get tougher and the mood more tense and the stakes so high.

When Oregon guard James Davis missed the front end of a one-and-one and the Ducks were leading Texas by only two points with 34 seconds to play, and when the Longhorns tied the score 10 seconds later, Frederick Jones told the disconsolate Davis that it was OK, that Jones would make sure the game wasn’t lost and that Davis would not be a goat.

When two Kansas starters, Nick Collison and Kirk Hinrich, were in foul trouble five minutes into the Jayhawks’ game against Illinois, Coach Roy Williams looked confidently at his deep bench and felt as if the game would still be in Kansas’ control because the assorted freshmen and sophomores had all played important minutes all season and had learned something about failure, certainly, but learned much more about success.

One of those freshmen, Aaron Miles, says it was no big deal when Hinrich, a guard like himself, went to the bench. “All us freshmen, we knew we had to step it up. But it’s something we knew we were capable of doing because we’d done it.”

Illinois’ leading scorer, Frank Williams, had been strongly criticized for a perception that he would not play hard or seriously all the time. The criticism was especially strong after Williams was scoreless in the first half of Illinois’ second-round game last weekend against Creighton and then scored 20 in the second half.

“People can say what they want,” Williams had said, “but I know when it’s time to play.”

There is a certain arrogance to that attitude, a certain sense of entitlement, as if even great talent can be put into hibernation or left unnurtured until you feel like using it. And sports doesn’t work that way.

When Williams needed to make an open, relatively routine jump shot with six seconds left and his team losing by two against Kansas on Friday night, Williams couldn’t make the shot.

When Oregon’s Jones drove to the basket in a tie game with less than three seconds left, when Jones moved as close as possible to the basket, when he knew just how hard to push on the defender to give himself an advantage but not a foul, Jones was relying on memory, on how he had hit the same kind of shot against USC.

“When you’ve done it,” Jones says, “it makes it easier to do it again.”

In the first five minutes of a Kansas news conference Saturday, the word “confident” was used five times. It wasn’t said as a cocky brag. It was said because the Jayhawks, coaches and players, feel certain they are doing the right things with this team. They feel certain because those things brought Kansas undefeated through the Big 12 regular season. Those things, the ability to keep forcing tempo, to keep out of sluggish half-court games in which their depth and their talent at stopping and shooting on a dime are negated, served the Jayhawks well when Illinois kept pushing at them.

“We felt like we’d withstood the same kind of things Illinois threw at us,” Hinrich says. “When you’ve been committed to doing the right things all season, you kind of remember how to do those things in the postseason too.”

The teams that seemed to take pride in their ability to put aside mediocrity and rise to the occasion of the tournament are gone. UCLA, Missouri, Illinois, those teams had all bragged a little that it was OK to have been disappointing underachievers in January and February because they had all won a couple of games in March. But when it counted most, on the biggest weekend before the Final Four, the bad habits of January and February took priority over the assumption that March would make everything all right.

Oregon Coach Ernie Kent was pressed Saturday about whether his Ducks, who like to push the ball and force the tempo, who like to shoot early and often, would be better served slowing things down because, after all, Kansas does the same thing and has done it longer, with more people.

“We’re at our best when we can get out and run in transition,” Kent says. “Why would we think it would be different on this one day? We know who we are. We are who we are because that’s who we want to be. I’m sure it’s the same for Kansas. We’ve gotten to this point, both of us, by learning who we are and becoming who we should become.”

Luke Ridnour, Oregon’s point guard, suggested that today’s game would be fun to watch.

He’s right. It is fun to watch two basketball teams who have taken every game that has come before, even the losses, as a chance to improve, to create an identity, to become something consistent, something reliable, something to be proud of.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.