UK overcame a six-point deficit with less than six minutes to play against Notre Dame to advance to the Final Four. (Chet White, UK Athletics)
CLEVELAND – The way the Cats closed out, there was surely never any doubt in their mind they would come back and win.Kentucky was too poised, too confident, too good down the stretch for it to be any other way, right?”Heck no,” Aaron Harrison said.Andrew Harrison, meanwhile, couldn’t help but turn to a higher power in the final minutes of Kentucky’s 68-66 win over Notre Dame to reach a fourth Final Four in five seasons.”I was praying on the bench, man,” he said. “I was praying. I don’t know. I’m just happy we won. They’re a great team. They really outplayed us in some aspects of the game.”Through three-quarters of the game, that was certainly the case.Notre Dame held a six-point lead with less than six minutes to go. The Fighting Irish were the aggressors and the unbeaten season was very much in peril. For really the first time all year, UK seemed on its heels.”I said you’re playing too cool,” John Calipari said, recalling his halftime message. “It’s hard to be loose when the other team is playing harder than you.”Perhaps even more than its waves of depth and mountain of talent, this Kentucky team has been remarkable for its ability to stay in the moment. Whether the Cats have faced a nonconference home game, a Southeastern Conference road contest or a win-or-go-home NCAA Tournament matchup, they’ve been focused solely on the task at hand.For 34 minutes, that changed.”I don’t know about tight,” Aaron Harrison said, “but maybe I think we were looking ahead a little bit because we just want to win it all so bad and maybe we just weren’t focused on today as much we should have been.”And all of a sudden, the Cats had their backs against a wall. “When we was down and it felt like all the momentum was their way and you feel this pressure,” Willie Cauley-Stein said. “You’re making mistakes and Coach is yelling at you and you look up and there’s seven minutes left and I’m like, ‘I thought there was a minute left.’ The pressure was on you and you gotta kinda settle back down and make sure you’re playing loose and making sure your team’s together.”Just like the Harrison twins admitted doubt crept into their minds, Cauley-Stein is comfortable saying it felt briefly like the magical run might be ending. It only took a second for that to flip.”I did (feel like UK might lose) when there was about seven minutes left and then I realized there’s seven minutes left, like this is what we do,” Cauley-Stein said. “If we can get it tied again there’s no doubt in my mind that we win it.”Coach Cal set the tone for that.”My mind is never on we may lose,” Calipari said. “My whole mindset all the time is how are we going to win, how do we win this game. That’s all I keep saying to myself, how do we win the game. I want them to know we’re not playing not to lose; we play to win.”Following their coach’s lead, the Cats unleashed a 15-7 run to close the game. They overcame the best per-possession offensive output by an opponent of the season by making their final nine shots and scoring 24 points on their final 13 trips.”When it’s time to win we really want to win, that we can do it when we want to,” said Tyler Ulis, who drilled a huge 3 when UK trailed by six. “We gotta be ready, we gotta play like that the entire game. We always at the end of games say we need five stops, five stops, but this game it didn’t work out like that. They kept making buckets and we just had to make plays on the other end.”The Cats did, and now they’ll dance on and into Final Four showdown with Wisconsin next Saturday in Indianapolis.”They did enough, and they wanted to win, they do have a will to win, and I know that,” Calipari said. “I know that, I’ve coached them, I know they’ll make plays. It’s just a matter of you have to keep the game close enough so they can.”