MINNEAPOLIS — Virginia, a nice tortoise of an app with a warmish 114-year history, a knack for deliberative basketball and also an unthinkable splat of 13 weeks ago, spent Monday night climbing the last jagged rungs into a pinnacle. When eventually it made the final, painful steps in overtime, reached the very top and looked about, it understood a feeling long associated only with others such as Duke or North Carolina, the neighboring hares that constantly left it one of the overshadowed.
It was the first first-time men’s college basketball national champion in 13 decades, and may see back across the landscape of one hell of a narrative. It could see Texas Tech, the finalist Virginia outlasted from 85-77 in that overtime, a team so good it’d struck the NCAA tournament like a great wind coming from the large plains of Lubbock, felling Michigan State, Gonzaga, Michigan and Buffalo.
Gaze back from up high, and Virginia could see the carnival of drama that helped it wriggle from doom in life-shortening matches against Purdue, Auburn and Texas Tech. Squint harder, and it could observe clear back to March 2018, when Virginia became the first No. 1 seed in tournament history to lose to a No. 16 seed, a bewildering 74-54 thud from Maryland Baltimore County, the nadir of a five decades of tortured Marches. Yet right in front, it could see the droves in blue and orange in U.S. Bank Stadium, reveling as sound cascaded from lovers who rarely dared dream of such a thing.
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