The Badgers conquer Carolina
The last game the Wisconsin Badgers played in the 2014 NCAA Tournament was their Final Four national semifinal against Kentucky. Wisconsin was seeded several notches higher than Kentucky, but the Wildcats were a blue-blood, and blue-bloods have a way of carrying themselves in big moments. Kentucky might have been a No. 8 seed at that tournament, but in the Final Four, the Cats were a newly confident team. They had overcome the problems which dogged them during the regular season. Kentucky played like a No. 2 seed, so when the Wildcats met the second-seeded Badgers, it felt like a battle of equals, as opposed to a game in which one team was several leagues better than the other.
Kentucky was a good team to play in the 2014 regular season, but not in the NCAA Tournament. The Wildcats came alive and played like an elite team. Wisconsin engaged UK in a superb Final Four game, but the Wildcats hit the last and biggest shot to advance to the national championship game.
With this memory in mind, Wisconsin entered the 2015 Sweet 16 against a lower-seeded blue-blood, the North Carolina Tar Heels. North Carolina had a decent but hardly spectacular regular season. The Tar Heels were a No. 4 seed, which is not what North Carolina coaches, players, or fans expect. Carolina was emerging from a brutal two-year period in which nothing went right for the program and people wondered if Roy Williams had lost his fastball.
North Carolina came into that Sweet 16 game as a diminished version of itself, but in one game, one moment, the Tar Heels had a chance to reinvent themselves, much as Kentucky did in the 2014 NCAA Tournament.
Midway through the second half, Carolina’s revival effort was in very good shape.
The Tar Heels led Wisconsin, 53-46. The Badgers, as a No. 1 seed for the first time in the school’s NCAA Tournament history, had to once again respond to adversity. The good news was that Wisconsin faced this kind of adversity against Michigan State in the Big Ten Tournament final, a week and a half earlier. The bad news was that continuing to tempt fate the way the Badgers did in March of 2015 can lead to ultimate ruin and heartbreak.
Once again, the 2015 Badgers refused to accept a lesser fate. They reeled off a 19-7 run with a slightly injured Frank Kaminsky (he had been hit by a Carolina player) on the bench. Zak Showalter steadied the team. Sam Dekker scored 23 points. The Badgers rallied around themselves — and rallied against North Carolina — to defeat the Tar Heels, 79-72, in Los Angeles.
Wisconsin took a blue-blood’s best punch and punched back. The 2015 Badgers were enormously skilled, but their skill was matched by their resilience and competitive greatness. That’s why they went to the national championship game — the resolve, not the talent.
The roadsides of history are littered with broken dreams from talented teams which didn’t know how to fight when the going got tough. The Badgers had smooth, velvet-glove skill, but they also had rugged iron-fist determination. That latter quality helped them past North Carolina and back to the Elite Eight for a second straight season in 2015.
