The Best NCAA Tournament Game I Ever Saw: What made Virginia-Purdue so great

May 12, 2024

It’s only natural to boil games down to their most important moments, to the highest spikes of pure adrenaline, and to carry those moments forward most of all. We do it with tournament runs, with whole seasons, with the entire stories of careers. One play becomes the symbol — the oh, remember that? piece of b-roll — for everything else we remember or have forgotten about a player or a team or just one particularly glorious night of basketball, whatever it may be.

For Virginia, the Mamadi Diakite shot is that play. Even non-UVa fans could recite it by heart: Ty Jerome’s miss, the apparently disastrous tip-out deep into Virginia’s backcourt, Kihei Clark motoring to retrieve it, his immediate, heads-up look at Diakite, his whipped hurl up the floor, Diakite’s instinctual jump-stop floater, the way he and Virginia’s players react, wide-eyed and wild.

That’s the clip: the handful of seconds in every March highlight package, the visual aid immortalizing the hows and whys of Virginia’s 2019 national title.

(It was a play so good — and so unlikely — that it warranted not only second-by-second unpacking but also inspired some mildly conspiratorial analysis of Jerome’s miss, all of which was very fun at the time.)

It was an insane play. It was also just a tiny fraction of what made Virginia 80, Purdue 75 one of the best basketball games I’ve ever covered. Period.

After all, plenty of tournament games end in, or at least include, some last-ditch drama. The tournament is always good for a buzzer-beater or six. But how many of those games are as well-played in the 40 minutes before said buzzer is beaten, giving us a bonus five minutes? How many are as tense and taut throughout? How many feature the kind of quality basketball, from top to bottom, that the Boilermakers and Cavaliers served up that night — the efficient, well-drilled offense, the sets executed to perfection, the back-and-forth chess match between coaches, the way even the tiniest details, like the way players aligned their feet as they stepped into catch-and-shoot jumpers? How many feature environments as electrifying as the Yum! Center’s, where a crowd 22,000-strong, the vast majority of Purdue fans, thronged and throbbed throughout?

How many have Carsen Edwards?

There is some risk, because of how time and memory generally work, that Edwards’ performance that night will eventually be lost. You’ll be able to see it on a box score, if you really care to look, but those who don’t forget about it. We have a duty to prevent that from happening. What Edwards did against the eventual national champions was nothing less than one of the best individual performances in an NCAA Tournament game.

No, seriously. In 44 minutes, Edwards scored 42 points. He was 14-of-25 from the field. Nineteen of those shots were from 3, and he made 10 of them. For much of his senior season, the stocky guard struggled to balance his team’s need for him to play a high-volume scoring role with the kind of efficiency that helped his team win. He could drive Purdue coach Matt Painter crazy; Painter would promise that shots that came within the offense were good ones, and Edwards would have a game (or three) where he nailed it, only to throw up, say, an 8-of-27 stinker (at Maryland, on Feb. 12) or a 4-of-24 abomination (at Indiana, a week later, in a game Purdue somehow won anyway) the next time out.

Against Virginia, Edwards displayed the full range of his potential — of what a devastating force he could be when his many shots fell. He missed nearly as many 3s as he made, but it felt like everything he made went in, no matter how far he ventured from the rim, and he kept getting farther and farther away. There was no question throughout the game, including deep into the second half, that Virginia was the better team: The Cavaliers would come down the floor, run some good, balanced offense, get their usual diet of good looks for any of Jerome or Kyle Guy (who’d entered the game on a horrid shooting slump and ended it with 25 points and 10 boards) or De’Andre Hunter, and look like they were finally going to pull ahead, or gain that crucial separation, or whatever, and nope: Edwards would come right back down to the other end and bury a 3 in someone’s face. It happened over and over and over.

Sitting courtside, looking for hints in body language and dialogue in the narrative, you could see Virginia’s sense of exasperation grow. Gradually, Edwards’ makes were followed by a collective sigh. Hands would go up. Guy smiled at one point, like, Is this guy serious? Virginia coach Tony Bennett put Hunter, a top-five NBA lottery pick drafted in large part for his multi-tool defensive genius, on Edwards at first. Hunter guarded well; it didn’t matter. Then, Bennett switched to Clark. He also guarded well. That also didn’t matter. The Cavaliers had two of the best defenders in the country, one 6-foot-8, one 5-foot-9. Neither made a dent.

Clark’s best defensive possession of the night, arguably, came on an Edwards make with just over a minute to play. Edwards rose over a perfectly positioned, contesting Clark and banked in his 3 anyway. Later, the ever-cool Bennett would admit he ripped up his note card when that shot fell — and, crucially, realized that he needed to start sending extra defenders at Edwards in overtime, something Virginia basically never does. At the time, though, that bank was like game over. It was a bit lucky, sure. It was also completely cold.

You can get a feel for this dynamic watching the full game back, of course, and the NCAA’s YouTube account has the broadcast. It’s glorious, of course. Still, we recommend this 13-minute edit, also from the NCAA YouTube channel. By cutting out misses and mistakes, you get a better sense of what it felt like to watch this game up close. You can relive the relentless, exhausting back-and-forth, the way the arena exploded with every make, the speed with which it became apparent that Edwards was doing something historic, something we were lucky just to be watching.

After the game — and after overtime, and all of the celebration, and all of the questions about the Diakite play and what it all meant and how it felt to be going to the Final Four, and all of the remarkable Virginia-related stakes and narrative angles had been addressed yet again — Jerome was asked about Edwards. He practically thanked the asker.

“If nobody asked that, I was going to ask to add something,” Jerome said in the final moments of his press conference. “Because that was the best performance I’ve ever seen. That was the best performance I’ve ever played against.”

It is one thing to win a game. It is another to win against that.

It is one thing to see a crazy finish, a wild buzzer-beater, another slice of March Madness to pack away in our highlight-package memories. It is something else altogether when it punctuates a game like last year’s Elite Eight meeting in the South Regional. There are great finishes, and then there are great games. There are great moments, and there is greatness. Thanks to Edwards, Virginia 80, Purdue 75 had all of the above. We’ll never forget it.

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(Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)

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