BOISE, Idaho â
Standing next to Arizonaâs Deandre Ayton on Thursday night, Buffaloâs Jeremy Harris looked a bit like the old TV character Gilligan.
Harris was giving up 7 inches and maybe 60 pounds. He wasnât exactly the Big Unit.
If someone recast the sitcom âGilliganâs Islandâ today, youâd want a guy with Harrisâ countenance: a non-threatening appearance, slender, easygoing dude, unkempt hair.
Sort of the way many in college basketball cast Buffalo in Thursdayâs first-round NCAA Tournament game against the supposed might of Arizona and its Big Unit.
But every time Harris made another basket, beating Ayton to the bucket â beating everybody and anybody â you could almost hear the Gilliganâs Island theme song:
âJust sit right back and youâll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip. âĻâ
Arizonaâs trip to Boise was not only a fateful trip, it was the end to a fateful season. Fans of UA basketball grieve the end to each season differently, but Thursday seemed to deliver an entirely different type of mourning.
After all that had gone wrong, from the FBI investigation to the Bahamas and so much more, Arizonaâs exit seemed more inevitable than one creating a sense of heartbreak and disbelief.
Buffalo won 89-68, and it will be remembered for all the unrealized potential much like Arizonaâs 76-51 Elite Eight loss to Utah 20 years ago next week.
This time, Buffaloâs Jeremy Harris and Wes Clark were what Utahâs Andre Miller and Michael Doleac were in 1998.
Arizona said goodbye to Mike Bibby and Miles Simon in â98; on Thursday, it bid farewell to Ayton and Allonzo Trier.
âWhen you get someone like (Ayton), you want to go all the way,â UA coach Sean Miller said. âBut when you lose in the first round thatâs a tough pill to swallow.â
Arizona has been swallowing tough pills since September.
What hurts most about losing to Buffalo isnât the margin or the widespread angst of losing to a team that had never won an NCAA Tournament game. It is the fear that it might be years before Arizona passes this way again.
The future of Arizona basketball is so uncertain that someday Wildcats fans might consider being in the NCAA Tournament against a team like Buffalo a heady sensation.
About the only person in Idaho who didnât seem surprised at the force of Buffaloâs victory was Nate Oats, the Bullsâ coach.
He and his staff watched video of Arizona and Pac-12 basketball games for what seemed like forever this week. The more they watched, the more they liked the Bulls and the less they feared the Wildcats.
âThe more beatable they looked,â said Oats. âThey werenât that deep. We play fast. We have great guard play. I thought we could guard their guards. They had one ball-handler. I thought we could do a pretty good job.â
It was exactly the script No. 14-seeded East Tennessee State followed when it stunned No. 3 Arizona in a first-round game in 1992.
Big and slow doesnât often work in the NCAA Tournament. Quick, fast and athletic does.
Itâs Buffalo, not Arizona State, that should wear those âGuard Uâ T-shirts.
Arizona tried to get by using only its fastball Thursday. It was one-dimensional. That played into Buffaloâs trap: the Bulls produced a chest-heaving effort, as if they had been plugged into a battery charger all week.
Ayton, bless his basketball soul, took seven fewer shots than Clark. That should never happen, although Oats said it was almost predictable.
âAytonâs really good, but you can take a big out of the game in college,â he said. âYou can pack a guy (on defense), sit right behind Ayton the whole time. But you canât take a guard out like that. You canât take Wes Clark out of the game.
âThe thing was, if Trier got hot, if Parker Jackson-Cartwright caught fire, we knew weâd be in some trouble. We knew they were going to have to miss some 3s.â
Oh, boy, did Arizona miss some 3s. It was 2 for 18.
The history of Arizonaâs most anguishing NCAA exits the last 30 years can almost exclusively be traced to poor 3-point shooting.
The 1988 Final Four loss to Oklahoma? Arizona shot 6 for 23 from 3-point distance.
The â94 Final Four loss to Arkansas? Arizona was 6 for 32.
The â98 debacle against Utah? Arizona was 4 for 22.
The â01 Final Four loss to Duke? Arizona shot 4 for 22.
The 2011 Elite Eight setback to UConn? Arizona was 4 for 21.
What we donât now is if Thursdayâs loss to Buffalo will long be regretted. The Wildcats were flawed, but a lot of that was covered up by what turned out to be historically weak Pac-12 competition.
On Wednesday, Miller said that the UAâs defensive improvement since mid-season had been âalmost astronomical.â
Now it appears as if Arizonaâs defensive improvement was more a testament to the leagueâs dreadful 0-3 finish in the NCAA Tournament.
Early in the second half, the top defensive player of the Miller years at Arizona, Nick Johnson, tweeted âAre we going to play some defense?â
Johnson correctly called it from a TV screen hundreds of miles away from Taco Bell Arena.
So in the end, Arizona joined Arizona State and UCLA as first-round losers to lightly-regarded teams from New York: Buffalo, Syracuse and St. Bonaventure.
It was all so tidy.
A few minutes before tipoff, Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott stood at court level. His travel plans were not complicated. Ordinarily, he flies from one NCAA Tournament site to another, squeezing in as many games involving the Pac-12 as a travel agent can manage.
This week? No confusion.
New York 3, Pac-12 0.
It reminded me of the 1985 NCAA Tournament, the first of Lute Olsonâs Arizona career. The Pac-12 went 0-3 and the Wildcats were the last team standing. Pac-10 commissioner Tom Hansen flew to Albuquerque just in time to watch Arizona lose 50-41 to Alabama.
It was the worst year in modern Pac-10/12 basketball history.
But after Arizonaâs misadventure in Boise this week, that piece of history might require some rewriting.
