Furman delivers the first madness of this NCAA Tournament with finish that will endure

The moment the horn sounded, the bench cleared, Furman’s jubilant reserves joining those on the court. That was the first thing that happened here on Thursday at 2:49 p.m. There was a mass of jumping and screaming and hugging, youthful energy radiating from one end of the court to every crevice of the Amway Center.

The cheerleaders joined in and then the mascot, a Furman student underneath a costume of purple armor, wielding a comically large plastic sword, ran onto the court, too, looking for somewhere to go, someone to embrace. The players formed a small huddle, bobbing up and down. The band played. Furman’s fans stood and made whatever noises they could muster. Some cried.

This was all in the minute or so after it ended, after Furman secured a 68-67 victory against Virginia here in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. A 13 seed beating a 4. The champions of the Southern Conference taking down the school that’s been the ACC’s most consistent over the past several years. Little Furman over mighty Virginia.

Not the first madness of this March, given all the drama a lot of schools have endured already this month just to make it here, but the first madness of this particular tournament. And in one of its first games. Indeed, as the meme-worthy cliche goes: This Is March. Yes. The Furman celebration continued as everyone made their way off the court. It wasn’t clear if it ever stopped.

In the tunnel on the way to the locker room, coaches and players had only begun to process the most shocking and gratifying victory of their lives. One assistant coach kept screaming the same phrase to players who came off the court: “You earned that! You earned that!” A member of the band walked off the court saying, “We won!” as if he was still trying to convince himself, as if he still couldn’t believe the Paladins overcame a 12-point second-half deficit to win it seconds shy of the buzzer.

“What just happened?” asked another, and that was the same phrase, more or less, one of Furman’s freshmen, a reserve forward named Ben VanderWal, kept repeating to no one in particular as he paced around the locker room, while he and his teammates took this all in. A year ago, VanderWal had been a high school senior in Elmhurst, Illinois — a long way from Greenville, South Carolina.

Then he’d gone off to college and become a dependable bench player for the Paladins, and now he was walking around in a daze, like a lot of his teammates were, saying, “I can’t believe that just happened,” and, “How did that just happen?”

Well it happened like this: Furman trailed by four with 19 seconds left, and it looked over. It looked over even well before that, when Mike Bothwell, its best player, a fifth-year guard who averages 18 points per game, fouled out with about six minutes left. Bothwell walked to the bench, sullen, “in a moment of the most disbelief of my life,” he said, because he thought it was all over — and that’s when his roommate, Jalen Slawson, grasped him.

Slawson, a fifth-year forward, tried to offer his reassurances.

“He grabbed me when I fouled out and he said, ‘I’m going to make sure you put that jersey on again.”

Now back to the end. Nineteen seconds left, Furman down four and with the ball. The Paladins’ Garrett Hien, a junior forward, attacks the rim and is fouled. He makes the free throws — two-point game. And then came the turning point: the trap near the baseline. Two Furman defenders corralled Kihei Clark near the Virginia basket. He had nowhere to go. He shuffled backwards a hair, appeared to be ready to lose his balance, and heaved a high-arcing pass toward midcourt.

The seconds ticked away ... down to seven, six ... and there was Hien to intercept it.

He passed quickly to JP Pegues, who turned toward the basket and rose and the pandemonium began when his shot fell through, and became madder when Virginia’s last-gasp attempt missed. That was how it ended. That was how Pegues ensured that he’ll forever be a part of March lore, that his name will always carry some weight around a small campus a little north of Greenville, where even in its hometown Furman is often overshadowed by those power-conference big brothers in Clemson and Columbia. Now this was Furman’s moment, its time on the stage.

“It’s one of the best experiences of my life,” a breathless Hien said afterward. “It’s amazing,” and he labored to find the right words.

“I thought winning the SoCon tournament was a surreal feeling,” Bothwell said moments later. “This has no comparison. We were up — ‘Oh, man, we might win this.’ They came back, take the lead. We’re not getting good looks. We had to foul ... “

And then, he said, “Somehow, some way.”

This was Furman’s first time in the NCAA Tournament since 1980. It was the Paladins’ second tournament victory ever, after one against South Carolina in 1974 in The Palestra in Philadelphia. Forty-nine years between tournament victories, and when Furman finally earned one again it did it in one of the more dramatic ways fathomable — by turning what looked like a sure loss into an impossible victory, with 2.2 seconds to spare after Pegues scored the winning points.

Bob Richey, in his sixth season at Furman, called it a “team story,” in that this Furman team is full of players willing to sacrifice individual wants and needs for the greater good of the team. And that, Richey said, is “when the magic happens.” And then it happened here early on Thursday afternoon, in front of a nearly packed arena. The past week or so, Richey has repeated a phrase so often it has become something of an unofficial mantra:

“Let’s try to put the jersey on one more time,” he has told his players, again and again.

And so now, after this, “We’re going to find another day to put the jersey on,” he said.

He was standing outside his locker room. It was about 20 minutes since the end of his school’s most memorable basketball victory in 50 years. Most of his players hadn’t even taken their jerseys off yet. They were still processing what just happened. It was all a blur, moments of madness running together.