Mike Celizic

Some losses hurt for a while and then it gradually grows numb and then goes away.

What happened to the Memphis Tigers on Monday night isn’t that kind of loss. Theirs is the kind that lands on your skin like a branding iron, burns a white-hot path into your tissues, drills into your bones and takes up an aching residence there forever.

You have a nine-point lead with little over two minutes to play, you don’t lose. And if you do, no matter how well the other team played down the stretch, you go home knowing you helped them get it done.

John Calipari, the Memphis coach who has to be wondering if he’ll ever win one of these things, knew it.

“I told them that they did everything they were supposed to to put us in a position to win a national title. You have the kind of lead we had, you're supposed to win the game,” Calipari said, the pain oozing out of every pore of his body as he sat on the dais, trying to respond to questions that had no answers.

The Tigers had this game won, and they were doing it in magnificent fashion. They fell behind by seven in the first half, playing miserably in the final minutes before the break. But they came out hard in the second half, got on Kansas like slime on a slug, built a lead and seemed to be on their way to history.

At two minutes, they had that lead that is insurmountable in almost every game you’ll ever see. It was like standing over a two-foot putt on the 18th green of Augusta National with a two–stroke lead in the Masters.

And then they three-putted, put the game into overtime, and that was it. They didn’t quit so much as surrender, their exhaustion showing in every clanked shot in the extra five minutes and in their inability to get under the boards to rebound their own misses.

Calipari had been saying for the three weeks of the NCAA tournament that his team’s lousy free-throw shooting wouldn’t hurt the Tigers because they were hitting them at a better than 70 percent clip in the games that counted. But down the stretch, when one more point would have made it impossible for Mario Chalmers to hit the heroic 3-pointer that tied the game for Kansas, Memphis clanked free throw after free throw after free throw.

And afterward, Calipari had no answer other than to blame god for the loss, saying it was the will of the almighty that Kansas win and Memphis lose. I don’t doubt that makes him feel better, but it’s an insult to Kansas and to the courage, determination and performance under pressure they showed when it counted most. People win and lose these games, not fates or supernatural powers. As Cassius said in “Julius Caesar,” “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”

That makes the Jayhawks the overlings in this drama. They won this in as great a comeback as you’ll see, a comeback that paralleled Memphis’ collapse.

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Before the game began, Kansas coach Bill Self allowed CBS to put a camera in his locker room and delivered his best Knute Rockne speech to his team.

“Most every day for the rest of your lives, you will be reminded or think of this night,” he told them. He may as well have been talking to Memphis, too.

This was a loss that’s going to hurt forever. Go out and get run off the court, and you shrug and move on. Lose like this and it follows you around like E-3 follows Bill Buckner.

If you put this on a pain scale of 1 to 10, you’d be a couple numbers shy of being able to measure it. If this loss were a country song, it’d be your wife running off with a long-haired Green Peace lawyer who graduated from Harvard in your stretch-cab pick-up truck towing your boat. With your dog. And even that falls short. To get all the way to the same pain level, you’d have to drag your sorry behind into the house, go in the refrigerator, and find she took your last six-pack, too.

“It’s one thing to win; it’s another thing to win the way we won,” said Self, who got his first big job as an assistant at Kansas when an assistant named John Calipari left for Pittsburgh.

And it’s the same thing to lose the way Memphis lost. It’s almost unfathomable.

So if you ever run into any of these Tigers, do them a favor and don’t say, “Weren’t you on that Memphis team that blew that big lead?”

Even if you recognize them, pretend you don’t know who they are or what they did. Ask them about their jobs or their families or what’s on their iPods. Just pretend the game never happened, because, believe me, they don’t need you to remind them.

The pain they're feeling will never go away.

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