Orange Rush

I'm still awfully giddy about the win last night. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that last night's Illinois-Arizona game should go down alongside Duke-Kentucky in 1992 and North Carolina-Kansas in 1957 among the greatest college basketball games ever played. And I hope I would say the same thing had Hassan Adams' desperation three gone in at the end of overtime.

Because I'm still too hopped up on adrenaline to think straight, I'm just going to aggregate blog posts and interstice articles here. Mark Tupper blogs that he's "still trying to figure out what happened a few hours ago when I sat courtside for the greatest college basketball game I've ever covered." Mike DeCourcey writes that Illini Assistant Jay Price and the rest of us saw "the greatest comeback in NCAA tournament history." Bill Rhoden writes in the New York Times that "Just like that, Illinois leaped back to life: a 3-pointer, a basket in the lane, a score after a steal, a basket and then a steal, leading to another basket. ... The Illini miracle continues" BigTenWonk must have put a pot of coffee on after the game because already has gobs of things to say.

One original thought, though. Looking back, anybody that saw the Michigan game at Crisler Arena this year -- especially that sequence Dee Brown had in the second half -- knows exactly where Illinois' comeback came from. Remember this? "Brown turned three straight steals into baskets, including the go-ahead three-point play, and scored 16 points to keep the Illini undefeated with a 57-51 victory over Michigan on Tuesday night." That's where it came from. Only on a bigger stage.