By Mike DeCourcy

updated 9:19 p.m. ET March 19, 2005

There was a period at the end of Thursday afternoon when the nation finally got a good look at Andrew Bogut's greatness. But it was subtle, as understated as one of actor Edward Norton's quietly brilliant performances.

They got another look on Saturday when Utah stunned No. 3 seed Oklahoma, but that wasn't Bogut's best performance. He was more sublime, scoring just 10 points but finding every open teammate when the Sooners focused their defense around stopping the center.

So let's go back to Thursday.

Only a small percentage of the U.S. was scheduled to watch the first-round NCAA Tournament game between Utah and UTEP. As Washington, Boston College and Cincinnati went about the business of wrecking their first-round opponents, however, more and more of the nation was switched over to the highly competitive Utes-Miners game by CBS.

Slide show   March 27 See images from the wins by Michigan State and North Carolina on Day 8 of the NCAA Tournament.

By then, Bogut had scored the majority of his 24 points. UTEP had taken to throwing everything defensively it could muster at him, driving him away from the basket with double- and triple-teams. So it might have been that the threat of Bogut was enough to deliver Utah into the second round.

With 41 seconds left and the game tied, Bogut set a screen at the top of the key for guard Marc Jackson. One defender tried to fight through that screen. The big man assigned to Bogut ordinarily would have showed out beyond the screen to dissuade Jackson's shot. But that didn't seem like a grand idea, seeing as how it would have left Bogut pretty much unguarded.

Jackson was free to shoot from just inside the top of the key. And that was the game's decisive score. It wasn't Bogut that made the shot, but it wouldn't have been a basket without him.

His defensive presence was no less important. With 2:41 left, UTEP's Jason Williams had the ball on the left block and a chance to score inside. But none of his pump-fakes could unbalance Bogut, and when Williams' shot finally went airborne, Bogut both blocked and rebounded the ball.

Down four points in the final 20 seconds, UTEP guard Filiberto Rivera attempted to drive the ball at the goal. It's hard to figure how he forgot that Bogut was waiting for him, but not hard to guess what the result would be. It was Bogut's fourth block.

Perhaps no play was more telling of Bogut's brilliance than a simple defensive rebound he gained just inside the three-minute mark. By that point, UTEP had taken to blocking out Bogut by staring him in the face. The Miners paid no attention to the ball. They turned their back to the ball and tried to keep him from the boards by directly monitoring his movements. Bogut reached right up and grabbed the ball, anyway.

Bogut's quiet heroics helped get Utah to the second round, and a matchup with Oklahoma. Still more fans will get the opportunity to see him there. The Utes rarely played on national TV this season, and the games that were televised happened mostly in the early part of the season, before the story of his excellence began to spread.

The longer he plays now, the bigger the audience.

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