By Lewis Gould
It is hard to believe it has been 31 years since Villanova’s miraculous run to the national championship in Lexington, Ky.
Record: 25-10
Best team that season: Georgetown (35-3)
The Wildcats played at Pitt in their final regular season game and crumbled on the Fitzgerald Fieldhouse floor, losing 85-62.
Those same teams met again the following week in their first game of the Big East Tournament, and Pitt won that time by eight. In doing the favor of helping the Panthers squeeze into the NCAA field, the Wildcats had set a pretty low bar for their NCAA Tournament potential.
And they never really played all that great, except that they never lost: Dayton by 2, Michigan by 4, Maryland by 3 – only when the Wildcats throttled a North Carolina team with future pros Kenny Smith, Brad Daugherty and Joe Wolf by a dozen to earn a Final Four berth did it start to seem there was something special with these Wildcats.
And then they played “The Perfect Game” against Georgetown, shooting 90 percent in the second half to earn a 66-64 title game victory.
