The beauty and tragedy of taking part in a great crowd pop is that you had to be there. The TV sound mixers will not do it justice, nor will that guy who filmed the whole thing on his busted iPhone. The YouTube video you’ll pull up years later, trying to remember the moment, will only underwhelm you in relation to the real thing. (You don't understand: I swear this Tim Hardaway Jr. three prompted the loudest reaction in the history of professional sports. I SWEAR!)
So here's the highest praise I can bestow on a highlight: The game-winning shot that sent fourth-seeded Minnesota to the Sweet 16 on Sunday caused such pandemonium that even the sound-mixed, through-a-screen YouTube version of it absolutely rules. Look at the cameras shake!
A packed Williams Arena had just watched senior Amaya Battle hit a baseline jumper to put the Golden Gophers up 65-63 over Ole Miss with 0.8 seconds left. That Battle was the one taking the shot made it extra sweet. A Minnesota native and former Miss Basketball who won two state championships at nearby powerhouse Hopkins High, she's playing in her first NCAA tournament this year, her fourth season at Minnesota. Now she's taken the program to its first Sweet 16 trip in more than 20 years.
Those Gophers, the ones who made three straight Sweet 16 appearances from 2003 to 2005, were helmed by another Minnesota hometown hero: Hall of Fame point guard Lindsay Whalen. Battle doesn’t exactly remember those teams—"I was one year old," she had to remind a reporter who asked at the postgame press conference on Sunday—but she knows Whalen well. The four-time WNBA champion was the one who recruited Battle to Minnesota; she was fired from her job as head coach at the end of Battle's freshman season.
Battle and her teammate Mara Braun, a redshirt junior and fellow Minnesota native, decided to stick around through the coaching change. It was a decision motivated in part, Braun said, by what they'd admired about Whalen. "She's paved the way for us, honestly, and when we came here, we wanted to do what she had done and bring the hype back to Minnesota."
The hype is back—at least, it sounded back. "It was deafening," head coach Dawn Plitzuweit said. "It was deafening in warmups." Plitzuweit's teams have seen steady improvement since she took over. The Gophers finished fourth in the Big Ten this year, and with a winning record in conference play for the first time in eight seasons. They'll play the winner of Oklahoma State-UCLA in the next round.
If Plitzuweit is partly responsible for bringing the hype back, she did still credit the crowd with forcing a critical fourth-quarter shot clock violation in Sunday's game. Ole Miss coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin gave them the same credit, and said she was motivated to do better in the next regular season so that her team might enjoy home-court advantage in the first two rounds of next year's tournament. "If you want to know how home-court advantage feels," McPhee-McCuin said, "I feel like their fans won them that game today."
