NC State, desperate for basketball success for so long, suddenly has more than its share

Kevin Keatts paused at the top of the ladder. There could have been any number of things going through his mind as he turned away from the rim to face the crowd, any number of thoughts of redemption and vindication and triumph.

But that’s not what his fist pump was about, before he turned back to complete the cutting of the first net. N.C. State is going to the Final Four in one of the great we’re-not-an-underdog underdog runs of all time, a No. 11 seed that finished 10th in the ACC, winners of nine straight elimination games, and there’s not just one reason why the Wolfpack has become a team of undeniable destiny.

This team of transfers all followed different and sometimes tortuous paths to this point, and their past trials and tribulations have become the Wolfpack’s biggest strength. There’s very little N.C. State hasn’t seen before, whether before or during this season, including a halftime deficit to Duke on Sunday. And this assemblage of players and their once-embattled coach has tapped into a power they didn’t know they had.

Which is what was going through Keatts mind as he gave that triumphant swing of his fist through the air at the top of his second ladder in three weeks. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t any single player. It took everyone to make this miracle happen.

“A lot of things in life are bigger than you,” Keatts said as he sat next to his wife in the quiet of his temporary office, as NCAA officials rushed N.C. State to the buses for its charter flight home. “This is a bigger-than-you moment.”

It doesn’t get much bigger than the fourth Final Four in N.C. State history, the least likely of them all, the first-ever 14-loss team to make it to the Final Four. N.C. State keeps asking “Why not us?” and no one’s had an answer yet. Certainly not Duke, which lost to the Wolfpack for the second time in three weeks on Sunday, 76-64.

Throw in the women’s own trip to the Final Four, secured earlier Sunday, and a school so starved for basketball success for so long suddenly has more than its share.

“The school needed it,” Wolfpack guard Casey Morsell said. “We feel it. We feel the fan base wanting those memories back. We love N.C. State, everyone loves being here, coming in competing, grinding for N.C. State. It feels awesome. It’s amazing everything’s coming together. That last stretch of the regular season, it was tough. We knew it was the details, the little things. We got it together at the right time, and the rest is history.”

So often, N.C. State’s basketball history can feel like an anchor, or a burden, living up to the stories and legends told and retold so often over the past 40 or 50 years. Somehow, as this team charted a course all of its own, that history became a tailwind sweeping it along.

Zach Edey, who didn’t need a ladder to cut down the net Sunday, and Purdue are up next, Saturday in Glendale, Ariz., and some referees who were hoping to get the call to work the Final Four might prefer to take the week off rather than adjudicate the battle in the paint between those two behemoths, Edey and D.J. Burns.

The men’s win came only a few hours after the women clinched their spot in Cleveland, making N.C. State the third ACC school to have a team in both. Burns FaceTimed with the women’s team on their bus from amid the celebration on court, and said the Wolfpack players got in trouble for having the volume on the women’s game turned up when they were supposed to be preparing for Duke.

“All the love to them, shout out to them,” Burns said. “We couldn’t go out there and let them talk that junk to us about how they got there and we didn’t. It feels good, man. Amazing.”

Burns was at the unquestioned epicenter of this game. As was the case when Duke won in Raleigh, the Blue Devils decided to play Burns straight up, no doubles. And not only did Burns cook for 29 points, the players around him almost couldn’t miss as the Wolfpack erased a six-point halftime deficit in the first seven minutes of the half.

That was the message at halftime: The defense was fine. The Wolfpack was getting good shots. They just needed some to go down — the kind that so often had during this run, but didn’t in the first half. As as Duke went cold from the perimeter, and Kyle Filipowski fouled out, a building full of people who had flown three hours from the same place to be here started to get the sense that N.C. State’s run wasn’t over yet.

That made it a particularly cruel ending for Duke, with Filipowski watching helplessly and guards Tyrese Proctor and Jeremy Roach combining to go 2-for-13 in that second half as the Wolfpack slowly and relentlessly pulled away.

The Blue Devils lost twice to North Carolina, including Senior Night in Cameron. N.C. State denied them any shot at an ACC title, then ended their season. That’s a particularly brutal 1-4 record within the Triangle.

In a sense, Duke discovered in these past two meetings what N.C. State figured out about itself before the ACC tournament: If the Wolfpack didn’t beat itself, it was a tough team to beat. No one’s been able to do it yet. Duke is far from alone in that respect.

That realization was the trigger for a run that has now secured its own place in N.C. State history, regardless of what happens in Phoenix. Steve Smith was right: N.C. State is a basketball school, always has been, and doing something like this, beating all these odds, is going to be commemorated and memorialized and honored like no place else, and for a long, long time.

“It’s something everyone’s been hoping for, for so long,” Morsell said. “Guys like (Dereck) Whittenberg and those guys have come back and shared their stories, but now we hope to be like those guys. Just like them.”

Keatts said he briefly debated not cutting down the nets, to reinforce the message that N.C. State wasn’t done yet, but couldn’t deny his players that moment. He would get his turn as well, at the celebration Everett Case invented, having now taken N.C. State to the same number of Final Fours as Case himself.

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