WASHINGTON, D.C. — Wearing his son’s jersey number — 24 — while standing at his seat, halfway up Section 120 in Capital One Arena, Josh Mullins didn’t gasp or shriek when a teammate passed his boy, Braylon, the ball with three seconds left in a game with the Final Four on the line. Everyone else did. Unlike most, though, Josh had seen this show before.
“He’s hit three shots like that,” Josh said with a smile.
Three, you say?
“Yes, but this one means a lot more.”
Mullins’ last-second, net-rattling, crowd-roaring, madness-inducing, and — most importantly — game-winning 3-pointer isn’t any less remarkable because he’d previously accomplished such a feat. In fact, his shot-heard-round-the-basketball-planet on Sunday evening didn’t only send Connecticut to the Final Four — a 73-72 victor over the bluest of the blue bloods, the Duke Blue Devils — but that sweet swish finished one of the most epic comebacks in any NCAA tournament game.
It is a thing of magic. Legendary. Unthinkable. Mesmerizing. Mullins and the Huskies put the madness in March.
A Comeback for the Ages
How else to describe one team wiping away a 19-point deficit by stealing a pass while down two points with four seconds left, then taking its first lead since the opening minutes of the game on a true freshman’s long-ball launch as the clock hit 0.4 seconds?
It’s quite unbelievable — all of it.
UConn, now 33-5, led for just 51 seconds of this 40-minute affair. Duke had never lost in an NCAA tournament game in which it led by at least 15 points at halftime. No. 1 seeds were 134-0 when leading by at least 15 at half of the Big Dance.
Mullins was 0 for 4 from regular 3-point range before his shot from the moon found its home through the net. UConn started 1 for 18 from beyond the arc.
The Huskies, down 72-70 with six seconds left, didn’t even have possession until a confounding turnover.
The Final Seconds
Let’s walk through the game-ending insanity.
Ten seconds. Inbounding the ball against UConn’s full-court press, Duke’s Isaiah Evans passed to Cameron Boozer, who passed back to Evans, who passed to Cayden Boozer, who then ran into a two-man trap of Mullins and UConn guard Silas Demary in between the 3-point arc and the half-court line.
Seven seconds. That’s when things went awry. Cayden’s attempted heave to teammates across halfcourt didn’t have enough height to get over the outstretched hands of the 6-foot-4 Demary. On replay, the ball seemed to barely tip off of Demary’s fingertips — the difference, it turned out, between victory’s thrill and defeat’s agony.
“I sold out,” Demary said. “Either we get the steal here or they get an open dunk.”
Five seconds. The loose ball took a few hops before Mullins corralled it, threw to teammate Alex Karaban, who thought seriously about launching the magic shot himself before he tossed it back to Mullins.
“I’d seen Braylon for some reason and had the gut sense to pass it to him,” Karaban said. “I had Cam Boozer in front of me. Harder shot.”
Meanwhile, UConn coach Dan Hurley watched from the bench, deciding to keep an unused timeout. He noticed Braylon’s body language. He seemed in rhythm. Why not let it play out?
“You’re torn. It’s gut instinct,” Hurley said. “It just felt like the window that you’ve got to let March Madness take over. March Magic.”
At 2.1 seconds on the clock, Mullins, closer to the half-court line than the 3-point circle, standing nearly all alone with a defender roughly four feet from him, punched his way into college basketball lore with authority.
‘The Greatest Thing in My Life’
“It’s just crazy,” Mullins said. “You cannot even process or explain it. It’s single-handedly the greatest thing in my life.”
For the freshman from Greenfield, Indiana, the shot was the culmination of a lifetime of work — and, as his father noted, the fourth time he’d hit a shot of this magnitude. But none of the previous three came with a trip to the Final Four on the line, with Duke as the opponent, with a 19-point comeback completed in the final seconds.
The win sends UConn to the Final Four for the third time in four years, continuing a run of dominance that has established the Huskies as the premier program in college basketball. But this victory — against Duke, on this stage, in this fashion — will be remembered long after the final buzzer of this tournament sounds.
Analysis: March Magic at Its Finest
What made Mullins’ shot so remarkable was not just the moment, but everything that led to it. The 19-point deficit. The 0-for-4 shooting from deep. The 1-for-18 team start from beyond the arc. The fact that UConn had led for less than a minute of game time. The stolen pass. The decision by Hurley to trust his players rather than call timeout. The pass from Karaban, who had the sense to find his teammate rather than force his own shot.
“It just felt like the window that you’ve got to let March Madness take over,” Hurley said. And March Madness, as it so often does, delivered.
For Mullins, the shot will define his college career regardless of what happens in the Final Four. For UConn, it adds another chapter to a legacy that includes five national championships and a modern-era dynasty. For Duke, it’s a devastating loss that will haunt the program until next season.
But for anyone who watched, it was a reminder of why this tournament is unlike anything else in sports. On a Sunday evening in Washington, a freshman from Indiana hit a shot that will be replayed for decades. His father, who had seen him do it before, knew it was possible. The rest of us were just lucky enough to witness it.
