It looked like a Lotto ball, the way it popped crazily around.
First, Connecticut’s Jake Voskuhl took a shot that rattled in and out and into a forest of fingertips, then into the hands of Richard Hamilton, who put up a shot that bounced off the rim.
But Khalid El-Amin, at 5 feet 10 inches the smallest player on Connecticut’s roster, somehow got a hand on the ball, as did Kevin Freeman, and they directed the ball back to Hamilton, who was in the lane.
“I looked at the clock, and it said 1.8 seconds and I said, `Shoot it,’ ” El-Amin said.
Hamilton not only is a good listener, he’s a good shooter too. His fallaway, game-winning shot at the buzzer gave Connecticut a 75-74 victory over Washington on Thursday night. It will play North Carolina in the East Regional final Saturday.
It was a wild, crazy, wonderful finish if you were a Connecticut player, and simply wild and crazy if you were a Washington player.
“It was a classic basketball game,” coach Bob Bender admitted afterward.
It was. Washington had taken its first lead of the game when Donald Watts hit a three-pointer with 33 seconds left. Connecticut called a timeout and decided to whittle the clock down to 10 seconds before going for the game-winner. El-Amin drove off a pick, then passed to Voskuhl, thus beginning the sequence that would send the No. 2 seed into the Final Eight.
Washington, the No. 11 seed, came agonizingly close to an upset.
“I got my hand on it,” Washington center Todd MacCulloch said. “I wasn’t able to get control of the ball. I was trying to tip it as far as I could. Every time that happened, it seemed to go to one of their players.”
The one that mattered was Hamilton, who was weakened by a cold. A few days earlier, as he watched West Virginia win on a last-second shot, Hamilton turned to Freeman.
“I told him, `Kev, I’ve never made a buzzer-beater in my whole life,’ ” Hamilton said.
There was Hamilton Thursday night, underneath a pile of his teammates, all celebrating the game-winning shot.
“We didn’t want our season to end,” coach Jim Calhoun said.
Is this Connecticut’s year? The school came into the tournament with one of the best records in the 1990s, but the Final Four has eluded them.
This is another year, Connecticut says. El-Amin said North Carolina was the team he’s been aiming at since the seeds were announced.
“The best ought to play the best,” he said.
