For all the talk of "One Shining Moment", March Madness is more often a "Defining Moment". You can be Jason Richards of Davidson and valiantly lead the nation in assists, but your Wikipedia entry will note that you missed a 3-pointer that would have knocked out eventual champion Kansas in the 2008 tournament. You can be Chris-Douglas Roberts, a first-team All-American who scored a game-high 22 points in the 2008 championship contest, but history will remember that you missed your final three foul shots in regulation (and calmly drained two in overtime when the matter was all but settled).

That's your, "Isn't he the guy who…?" legacy.

Or you may be Mario Chalmers, who played a solid (18 points, 6-6 from the free-throw line) if not memorable game. Until the final 2.1 seconds. Then you are named "Most Outstanding Player" of the Final Four.

Fate is fickle. In 1982 John Thompson, the Georgetown coach, watched North Carolina freshman Michael Jordan bury a jumper from the left corner to give the Tar Heels a 63-62 victory and the national title. Five years later Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim groaned as Indiana's Keith Smart hit the game-winner from nearly the identical spot on the court in the Hoosiers' 74-73 victory.

Both Thompson and Boeheim would be released from their professional purgatory, though. Both would later win national championships though, as Boeheim ruefully noted on Friday, "Nobody told me I'd have to wait another sixteen years to do so."

Guy Lewis, the Houston head coach and forgotten footnote in the miraculous Jimmy Valvano triumph of 1982, was never granted that solace. Lewis retired without ever having won a national title, and somewhere there must be an empty place inside of him, knowing just how close he was.

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John Calipari, the Memphis coach, will wake up tomorrow morning and, who knows, may have signed two new recruits by sundown. He will coach next year, and the year after that, and so on. Deep down Calipari, who handled tonight's heartbreak with class, believes that he will return to this Monday evening in a future year. And surely every one of his peers will reassure him of that.

But John Calipari cannot guarantee that to himself. And so until and unless he returns to a national championship game, Calipari will wonder if he will ever come as close to winning it all as 2.1 seconds away.

"I don't know if a coach ever deserves what happened to me tonight," the winning coach, Bill Self of Kansas, said afterward, "because I can't imagine feeling any better at any time."

John Calipari certainly would agree with the first part of that statement.

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