With nine seconds remaining in their Saturday afternoon encounter against UC-Irvine, the members of the Seattle University women's basketball team might have allowed themselves to hope and dream of a road victory.
Those dreams would be dashed just eight seconds later.
It's one of the most familiar sights in scholastic basketball - men or women, college or high school: A team takes a late one-point lead, only to give up a winning basket just before the buzzer due to the understandable instinct to stand and watch as a game is decided.
Anyone who loves basketball, anyone who has played this beautiful sport since childhood in the backyard or at a public playground, has visualized a last-second shot. Time stands still. Everything blurs into a slow-motion tableau of bodies who stand like statues while YOU, the action hero, speed to the basket or rise up to hit a game-winning jumper. If you breathe basketball, you know that last-second situations bring about a desire to observe how the ending will unfold. Before young people played the game, they watched the game and loved it.
It's perfectly natural to become a spectator in the final minutes... but that's the very same reason why college and high school coaches grow gray hairs, too. Saturday, Joan Bonvicini - who has been through the battles and has surely witnessed many stand-and-watch sequences in the final seconds of games - saw her team succumb to that very dynamic in Irvine, Calif.
With nine seconds left, SU's Ashley Brown hit two free throws to give the Redhawks a 59-58 lead. After a 30-second timeout during which Bonvicini set up her defense, the visitors stood just one stop from their first road win in 2009, a milestone moment in their evolution.
The fun wouldn't last, thanks to the stand-and-watch syndrome.
Irvine worked the ball down the court, and with one second on the clock, Anteater guard Keyonna Johnson - who met little resistance from SU's defense - got to the rim and banked in a layup for a 60-59 victory that left the Redhawks with a gut-punched perspective.
The next time SU owns a late one-point lead, this game and its heartbreaking conclusion will motivate the Redhawks to keep their feet moving.
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