It has taken a while to process that there will be no NCAA tournaments, but reality is starting to set in. It’s an especially painful reality for the Gamecocks, the favorites to win a tournament that will never be played.
I’m not sure anyone has finished processing just what it means, not only just as a fan, but for the players, for the people who make a living off the tournaments, for the economic and legal questions we’re only beginning to ask.
The cynic in me says this is just another instance of the Chicken Curse. Of course it would happen the year the Gamecocks are favorites to win the national championship. Of course it would rob a team with a magically perfect roster and a path to the Final Four that never leaves South Carolina of a chance to prove its legacy. This will go down as the greatest “What if?” in Gamecock sports history. More than Navy, more than Marquez North, more than Coppin State or Sindarius Thornwell getting sick. More than all of that.
We have been robbed of March Madness. We have been robbed of tournament games, brackets, and a Final Four weekend in New Orleans. We have been robbed of a final between South Carolina and Oregon, a game between the nation’s best team and its best player. We’ve been robbed of a thousand Kool-Aid jokes along the way.
This was a special team. It was fun to cover, the most fun since the 2015 team. This team, like that one, had a variety of personalities that all mixed together as a unit. They played with swagger and humility. They had fun and made sure everyone around them had fun.
This season was Ty Harris going from good to great. It was KiKi Herbert Harrigan making funny faces as she knocked down approximately 99 of 100 baseline jumpers and waiting for Mad KiKi to show up. It was Aliyah Boston going from a beast on the court to a wide-eyed teenager off it. Zia Cooke doing things with the basketball that would make Allen Iverson’s jaw drop, and the giddy reactions from Harris as Cooke flexed after the shot. Brea Beal shutting down the best players in the game without ever changing her expression. The simmering electricity in Colonial Life Arena whenever Olivia Thompson and Elysa Wesolek shed their warmups and knelt by the scorers table. It was seamless rotations, blocked shots and steals. It was three pointers and they way they didn’t grab rebounds, they attacked them. It was those fast breaks, holy hell those fast breaks, when you’d swear they were playing seven-on-four with a three-second head start.
They weren’t doing things for the first time like the 2015 team was, but they were doing things bigger and bolder. Not a week went by that this team didn’t do something amazing, and they emphatically answered every single challenge sent their way.
They were great and they embraced being great.
And it’s all over. South Carolina finished the season ranked #1 in both polls and the RPI, so I’m sure they will hang a banner of some sort and claim a de facto title. The NCAA might even make it official, but it would still come with an asterisk. They don’t get to run through the tournament. They don’t get to beat Oregon, or Baylor or Maryland again, or whoever it would be. There are no nets to cut down.
South Carolina will be good for a long time, but this team had the special combination to win it all. That doesn’t just happen every year.
Then I check social media and I’m reminded of the players, and I feel guilty for thinking about all of that. Herbert Harrigan came back to South Carolina to win a championship. Harris talked frequently about how much it meant to leave the program with a championship, the same way she entered it. She blossomed into her big sister role this season, putting her name all over the record book, but without the last part.
The freshmen will have other chances, but not with this team. The hurt for them is different. They wanted to send Harris and Herbert Harrigan out on top. There was a noticeable shift in the tone of their messages to each other on social media, and I’m sure even more was said privately.
For walk-on Olivia Thompson, even though she didn’t play much, this season was a dream come true. She grew up imagining that someday she would win a title in a Gamecock uniform (go to the third picture).
She shared an eloquent, touching message on Twitter that summed up how she felt about this team.
You hope that at some point a celebration will be held to recognize this team, but right now, even that isn't possible.
It’s not just the Gamecocks who suffer. There are so many others. Nikki McCray took on a tough rebuilding project at Old Dominion, and this was the payoff season when she was going to get the Monarchs back in the tournament. Southeast Missouri State was going to its first tournament in 13 years. Dayton was having a once-in-a-generation basketball season, with the women in the tournament and the men’s team having an improbable season it will probably never duplicate.
High school all-star games have been canceled too, including the McDonald’s All-American Game. South Carolina’s only signee in the 2020 class, Eniya Russell, is one of those players that will no longer get a chance to play in the showcase, bringing an unexpected end to her high school career.
Who knows what will happen in the coming days and weeks because things have been changing so quickly. Who could have imagined at the beginning of this week we’d be where we are? There will be the retrospectives in ten, fifteen years - “The best team that never got a chance,” the 30 for 30 (although, being an ESPN production it will probably focus only on Oregon and ignore the consensus best team in the country), the reunions with, hopefully, other championship teams. But they’ll always be a team with an asterisk - the team whose legacy was left unfinished.
