With ties to NCAA’s greatest upsets, Sacramento is testament to tournament lifeblood

On Thursday at the Golden 1 Center, Mizzou will seek to end a 13-year, six-game NCAA Tournament losing streak when it takes on Utah State — which itself has lost nine straight NCAA tourney games since 2001.

But that gap doesn’t mean 10th-seeded Utah State isn’t informed by some significant NCAA postseason experience up against seventh-seeded MU.

The sort of stuff, in fact, that makes this tournament the phenomenon that it is.

Five years ago, Aggies coach Ryan Odom was leading the University of Maryland, Baltimore County when it engineered the unimaginable even in a tournament renowned for the improbable:

On the 136th try, the 16th-seeded Retrievers shattered an invisible wall by at last ending the first-round winless streak of top seeds in the tournament with a 74-54 drubbing of No. 1 Virginia.

By seed, anyway, it was the greatest upset in NCAA Tournament history.

“Each team that we’re fortunate enough to coach has one life to live,” Odom, in his second season at Utah State, said Wednesday. “That particular team lived a great life.”

That may or may not be pertinent against the Tigers.

But it certainly has a resonance that speaks to why nothing can be assumed. And it reinforces the enchantment of the tournament and what these shining moments mean to so many.

UMBC’s Jourdan Grant said that day five years ago.

“It felt like my soul left my body, man,” UMBC’s Jourdan Grant said that day five years ago.

The sense of never-ending possibilities is conjured all the more here.

Because also under the same roof are UCLA (playing UNC-Asheville) and a Princeton team (playing Arizona) coached by Mitch Henderson — who in 1996 was part of the 13th-seeded Princeton team that toppled the fourth-seeded defending national champion Bruins 43-41 in Indianapolis.

“If we played UCLA 100 times, they’d beat us 99,” legendary Princeton coach Pete Carril said after one of the greatest games I’ve been privileged to cover. “But that one was tonight.”

It was one for the ages, furnished through the coach who seven years before nearly guided his team to becoming the first 16 seed to take down a 1 only to finally fall 50-49 to Georgetown.

With Carril preparing to retire in 1996, the UCLA victory was a manifestation of one of his favorite sayings derived from “Don Quixote”:

“What good is being Spanish,” he would say, “if you can’t chase after windmills?”

And the spirit of the late Carril, who died at 92 last year, was everywhere here on Wednesday.

It was certainly within Henderson, who never dreamed then that he’d one day have the curmudgeonly philosopher’s job: “No way,” he said. “I was just trying to stay out of Coach’s glare.”

And it will be evident in the Princeton uniforms, adorned with a bow-tie patch to commemorate Carril and animated by players still in his sway.

“So much of what you see with us, the way we play, is what I’ve learned from (Carril and successor Bill Carmody) and modernized it,” Henderson said.

Heck, Carril’s lasting presence echoes merely by Princeton playing in Sacramento, where he joined the NBA’s Kings for more than a decade after retiring from Princeton.

So it might be surmised that Henderson will channel Carril in some way before his 15th-seeded team takes on second-seeded Arizona on Thursday. Perhaps as he did after Carril’s death, Henderson will read one of Carril’s favorite poems (“Thinking,” written by Walter D. Wintle in the early 1900s) to his players:

If you think you are beaten, you are;

If you think you dare not, you don’t;

If you’d like to win, but you think you can’t,

It’s almost certain you won’t.

If you think you’ll lose, you’ve lost ...

If you think you are outclassed, you are;

You’ve got to think high to rise;

You’ve got to be sure of yourself before

You can ever win a prize.

Life’s battles don’t always go

To the stronger or faster man;

But sooner or later the man who wins

Is the man who thinks he can.

The poem was written decades before the NCAA Tournament began in 1939.

But it might as well have been dedicated to the upsets that make it so enthralling and surely will also help define this tournament … even if it might be a while until we see one on the scale of what UMBC did five years ago.

“Will a 16 ever beat a 1 again?” Odom said. “I have no idea. It takes a special group.”

Special groups are all over out there, though, maybe even at a theater near you.

The enduring evidence will be found all around us in the brackets.

But it’s acutely so here — where Odom’s presence and Carril’s legacy are testimony to the fact that literally anything might happen … and to why we can’t wait to watch.