On NC State’s miracle run: A free throw, a buzzer beater and a world spun off its axis

A butterfly flaps its wings in Hong Kong. A strand of DNA mutates and replicates and replicates. Ninety-two million miles from earth, the sun spits out a gout of radiation.

The biggest events — life-changing, world-changing — can begin in the smallest places.

Isaac McKneely missed nine free throws all year. The ninth changed everything.

At any single point in this improbable run of nine straight elimination games, that was the closest N.C. State ever came to disaster, the one moment when the Wolfpack truly and thoroughly relinquished control of its own destiny: Down three to Virginia in the ACC semifinals, only a handful of seconds left on the clock, and an 85 percent free-throw shooter at the line for a one-and-one to seal the Cavaliers’ win and send the Wolfpack home.

That free throw goes down, and the Wolfpack doesn’t race to the other end of the court and hit a buzzer-beating, banked-in 3-pointer to force overtime. That free throw goes down, and N.C. State isn’t in Phoenix for the Final Four. That free throw goes down, and D.J. Burns isn’t an international star (and no one’s wondering whether he can play left tackle), let alone going body-to-body with Purdue’s gargantuan Zach Edey for a chance to play for a national title.

That free throw goes down, and the Wolfpack doesn’t play for an ACC title, doesn’t beat North Carolina, doesn’t go on a winning streak that rekindles memories of 1983, doesn’t crash the Final Four, doesn’t make history. None of that happens.

As McKneely stood at the free throw line, N.C. State arrived at the critical juncture of its postseason, the single point of potential fracture in this entire run. Even the overtime win over Oakland in the second round didn’t present that kind of imminent danger, thanks to the Golden Grizzlies’ inability to get off a shot on the final possession, thanks in turn to the Wolfpack’s agency on defense.

There has been only one moment when N.C. State’s fate really was out of its hands, and one moment only. One moment when the Wolfpack truly was simply the helpless victim of inescapable fate. When McKneely had the ball in his hands at the free-throw line line, the Wolfpack no longer had any voice in its future. For that fleeting second, it lost control of its fate.

“That’s a terrible feeling,” Casey Morsell said.

And instantly took it back.

The moment everything changed: Virginia was up 58-55 when McKneely went to the line with 5.3 seconds to go, presumably to seal the win and a date with North Carolina in the ACC title game. The free throw hit the front of the rim, and fell to Morsell standing below it with 4.9 seconds on the clock.

Morsell gathered the ball and started moving up the court, pitching the ball ahead to O’Connell on the left side of the court with 3.7 seconds left. (Virginia did not attempt to foul, a mistake Tony Bennett later lamented.) It took O’Connell another second to cross halfcourt, and another 1.4 seconds to pull up on the left wing over McKneely’s extended arm, O’Connell’s heels to the State bench directly behind him.

As time expired, the ball was just below apogee, on its way back down, toward the basket. O’Connell had landed, and stood watching with his weight on his right leg. Morsell was running down the lane out of habit, even though it was too late for any tip. Taylor had held up his arms on the opposite side, left wide open, but now he and the other three N.C. State players watched flat-footed, resigned to the result.

The entire building inhaled, if as one.

O’Connell’s shot hit the upper left corner of the square on the backboard and then the rim. The ball orbited the circumference of the rim twice.

“When that shot went up and it was rolling around, everything was kind of quiet to me,” O’Connell said. “I didn’t really hear much.”

Then it fell into the net.

“It just seemed like it was going around the rim in circles for about 30 minutes before it finally went through,” Ben Middlebrooks said.

In the brief moments before his teammates jumped off the bench and swarmed him, O’Connell turned to Burns and D.J. Horne and flexed. Taylor, stunned, didn’t run toward the celebration. He staggered there.

“My mind was blank,” Taylor said. “When he shot the ball, everything was all quiet. Blank. Even when he made it, I couldn’t even move. I just froze. I didn’t know what to do. It was crazy.”

Reborn, N.C. State won in overtime. It won against North Carolina. It won and won and won and won again. It beat Texas Tech and Oakland and Marquette and Duke (again).

While the Wolfpack romped through the NCAA tournament, Virginia was broken. The Cavaliers were shipped to Dayton for the First Four and got smoked by Colorado State in a game that did more to hurt the ACC’s basketball reputation than adding Cal and Stanford will. (It was actually only Virginia’s third-worst game of the season. The Notre Dame and Virginia Tech losses, by a combined 56 points, were both worse — even if it didn’t look that way.)

“Kind of takes the breath out of you,” McKneely said after the overtime loss to the Wolfpack. “It’s hard to think you have the game won, especially (when) I’m at the free-throw line, have a chance to win it, and I couldn’t do it.”

N.C. State has never looked back, not for a second.

“I was just hoping a miracle would happen,” Middlebrooks said. “I guess you can say one did.”

Three weeks to the day after that free throw bounces out, N.C. State practiced inside the cavernous confines of State Farm Stadium, its logo plastered on the outside of the building with Connecticut and Purdue and Alabama, a day from a national semifinals, two wins away from an NCAA title.

That entire bouquet of possibility has sprung from the seeds sown that Friday night in Washington, from a free throw that came up short and spawned one of the great stories in college basketball, a one-time powerhouse tapping back into past glory against all odds.

A butterfly flaps its wings in Hong Kong and the ripples propagate. A whisper becomes a breeze. A breeze becomes a gale. A storm becomes a typhoon, whirling across the Pacific. A free throw bounces off the front rim and N.C. State makes a Final Four.

From a single missed free throw, from one reprieve in an otherwise impeccable stretch, N.C. State has constructed an epic. The reverberations continue to echo. A basketball hit the front of the rim instead of going through it, and the world slipped off its axis just enough to open a door to the impossible.

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