Cardinal stunned in 1-point loss-
CINCINNATI - Jamila Wideman stayed on the floor Friday night, looking for hands to shake. Her Stanford teammates had already traipsed through the narrow passageway to their locker room, some sobbing, some staring off into space. Kate Starbird clutched her forehead with both hands, as if it were a basketball and she didn't want to let go.
Wideman, a senior point guard, didn't want to let go, either. So she kept finding Old Dominion players, digging them out of the corners to shake their hands.
"That's what you do," she said later, holding sobs deep in her throat. "No matter what happens."
She had to get it right before she left the court, so that her college career ended on something better than a rim-smacking jumper with 2 seconds left. Wideman couldn't leave as a champion, as she'd expected all year. But she could still get it right. She could properly congratulate Old Dominion for taking away her chance, for winning in overtime, 83-82, and advancing to the NCAA championship game.
She was operating on instinct, not rehearsed graciousness. Wideman had never planned to be a loser. How could she prepare to be a good one?
In Montana during the West Regionals, she had said: "I can't imagine not winning the championship. When I think about what's going to happen, I can't call that picture up. It's just not there."
She wasn't arrogant, just certain, with the undiluted confidence of a champion. The whole Stanford team behaved that way all year, as if visualizing defeat in the tournament would alter their destiny.
Then, Old Dominion forced them to surrender their belief, to dump a season-long companion in seconds. It would have been easier to let go gradually, but how does anyone do that?
You can't lose faith the way you lose a 15-point first-half lead. You can't stop believing when you see guard Charmin Smith leap past taller players, leave them in the dust, as she meets a rebound with 11 seconds left in regulation and Old Dominion up by two points. You can't brace yourself for a loss when Smith takes a foul and goes to the line shooting for overtime. She's a senior, and she makes both shots, revives the whole season. If that doesn't look like destiny, what does?
And so the transition was abrupt and devastating, from champion to beaten semifinalist in no time, from hot to cold so fast that thunder clapped in their heads and hearts.
The buzzer went off, and Starbird stood at the top of the key, staring at the basket, waiting for everything to go back to normal - for the last shot to fall, for the Stanford victory to come, for the championship game on Sunday night that couldn't possibly be waiting for someone else.
But nothing changed, and Starbird stopped waiting and fell to her knees. Just as she went down, Old Dominion coach Wendy Larry came toward her. Starbird had to rise, pulling herself up like a newborn colt struggling to its feet for the first time. Larry offered a quick embrace.
"The last play was supposed to go to me," Starbird said later in the locker room. "And I ran the wrong one, so I guess it was my fault." She spoke in a soft monotone, her face frozen in an expressionless mask.
The last play will live with them forever. Three shots on the basket in 12 seconds, Wideman from outside, Vanessa Nygaard from inside, Wideman from outside again. None of them went in. Destiny, it seemed, had become smitten with Old Dominion.
Nygaard took the rejection especially hard. She bent her head and pulled the V-neck of her jersey over her face. "I never thought we'd lose," she said later. "This was our year. We had all the tools."
Nygaard had made one of seven field-goal attempts and committed five turnovers. She couldn't forgive herself, especially for that one shot, the penultimate field-goal attempt in Stanford's season.
"I was just throwing it up there, I wasn't concentrating," she said between crying jags. "I didn't come to play."
Nygaard staggered off the court, aided by teammate Kristin Folkl. Folkl had 18 points and 10 rebounds. And now this assist, with her arm wrapped around Nygaard.
In the locker room, Olympia Scott did a TV interview, calmly and intelligently. Then, as she walked toward the showers, loud crying replaced her placid commentary.
Wideman sat in a chair, refusing to cry. "There's a whole lot to let go, and I'm not ready to do it," she said, the words coming out slowly. "But my heart is broken just the same."
Wideman and her fellow seniors had gone to the Final Four three straight years and never reached the title game. She tried to remember something other than the defeats, searched for the emotional distance that would make her recall her career at Stanford with the fondness it deserves.
"I wanted a national championship . . ." she started to say, and then paused and paused and paused. Her long curly lashes darted downward, her eyelids forcing back tears. She opened them again and choked out, ". . . more than anything in the world. But the reasons I wanted it so bad are because of how much I care about the people I was going to share it with. Those things will never go away."
Nor will the last sight of her in a Stanford uniform, first looking forlornly at the basket and then making the hardest transition move of her career - shaking all those hands, not missing a player.