It's 'One Shining Moment' that will live in NCAA tournament history

The headline said it all:

U Must Be Cinderella

The University of Maryland Baltimore County literally carved a name for itself on the college basketball landscape Friday night in Charlotte, N.C., by becoming the first 16 seed in history to defeat a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. It came in a stunning 74-54 magic carpet ride over top-ranked and overall No. 1 seed Virginia, a team that was 31-2 and won 20 Atlantic Coast Conference games this year.

This bracket buster was for all 135 other 16-seeds that had served as cannon fodder for the blue bloods of the sport since the field expanded to 64 teams (and now 68) in 1985.

So who exactly is UMBC?

If you didn’t know, and few can honestly say they did, UMBC is a public university about 10 minutes from downtown Baltimore. The team resides in the America East Conference, home to schools like the BinghamptonBearcats, Albany Great Danes, Stony Brook Seawolves and league darlings, the Vermont Catamounts, AEC champs six times since 2003.

So what’s with UMBC’s mascot?

The Retrievers? Maryland’s state dog is the Chesapeake Bay Retriever and has been the mascot of UMBC since the school’s founding in 1966. It’s been said that for good luck students rub the nose of his statue on campus.

So who is the UMBC coach, the one with the boyish face?

Ryan Odom is actually 43 years old, but looks only marginally different from the kid who was a University of Virginia ball boy in the 1980s while his father, Dave, was an assistant for head coach Terry Holland. The father, Dave Odom, also knows a little something about coaching. He was a four-time ACC coach of the year at Wake Forest, where his best player was a former swimmer from the Virgin Islands, some guy named Tim Duncan.

In 2016, Ryan Odom got his second college head coaching job, taking over a UMBC team that had gone 7-25 the previous season. In 2016-17 they won 21 games, second-most in school history, and claimed their first postseason win, over Fairfield in the CollegeInsider.com Postseason Tournament, a gathering of mostly mid-major and small schools passed over by NCAA and NIT selectors. They won twice more before losing to Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in the semifinals.

So how did UMBC do this season?

They had a 25-10 record, tying the school single-season high point for wins, went 12-4 in conference and ended a 23-game losing streak to favored Vermont in the conference championship on a 3-point shot by JariusLyles at the buzzer. But they also lost games to Colgate, Army and crosstown rival Towson in addition to an embarrassing 83-39 defeat at Albany in mid January. That’s a 44-point difference for those perplexed by math.

So what happened to Virginia?

After Friday’s first half ended 21-21, UMBC charged out of the locker room with a 24-8 blitz fueled by a trio of 3-pointers and 11 points from Lyles. Virginia never came closer than a dozen points thereafter. Virginia won 15 games this season in which it held opponents to 53 points or less, then allowed 53 points to UMBC in the second half alone.

So Virginia must be humiliated, right?

Sure, being on the wrong end of history tends to do that. But looking at the glass half full, this loss might now replace Virginia’s previous red-faced moment. Right before Christmas in 1982, the undefeated No.1-ranked Cavaliers played a game in Hawaii. Led by 7-foot-4 center Ralph Sampson, in the middle of his three-year reign as national college player of the year, Virginia lost 77-72 to the Chaminade Silverswords, an NAIA school. Until Friday, the name Chaminade was synonymous with David slaying Goliath. But that was an early regular-season game played multiple time zones away attended by fewer than 4,000 people, not a game on the brightest stage in college basketball.

So what’s next for UMBC?

Sunday’s date at 6:45 p.m. with ninth-seed Kansas State, the fourth-place finisher in the Big 12 Conference and a 10-point winner over Creighton earlier Friday. Who knows when the clock will strike midnight? But for now the slipper fits just fine.

“We all wanted to be in the “One Shining Moment” video,” said forward Joe Sherburne, referring to the song with the highlight montage played at the conclusion of the tournament championship.

Mission accomplished.

For today, and every March Madness henceforth, you’ll remember Cinderella’s name. It’s UMBC.

This story was originally published March 17, 2018 at 3:34 AM with the headline "It's 'One Shining Moment' that will live in NCAA tournament history."