Arizona’s A.J. Bramlett looks over the extra edition of The Indianapolis Star after the Wildcats beat Kentucky to win the national championship.

 Eric Draper, Associated Press 1997

Editor’s note: The following story first appeared in the April 1, 1997 edition of the Arizona Daily Star.

What writers around the country are saying about Arizona’s victory over Kentucky:

Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press: The game had the awkwardness of a teenager learning to dance, the stickiness of wet paint, the color of an unripe banana. Whacks, pokes, dumb passes, ill-advised shots. It simply was not polished basketball — the inevitable problem with inexperienced feet being asked to walk the highest rope.

And yet â€Ļ

And yet, when a championship is on the line, even mistakes and bumbled shots and dribbles off the knee take on a furious importance, and you find yourself pacing, shivering, pushing your hands on your thighs, inhaling through your teeth, waiting like everyone else, to see who has the last laugh in the Big Dance.

Bad basketball. Great drama.

Did you need to be tough, or have an iron stomach? The star of the night, the game’s most outstanding player, was a junior guard out of California named Miles Simon — named for Miles Davis, the jazz trumpet player — which was appropriate, since you had to improvise in a game like this.

Simon improvised all right, almost every time he had the ball — ducking, twisting, spilling, dipping, running down the lane for one-handed tosses that fell through with the ease of an executive tossing paper wads at the trash can.

Chuck Culpepper,

Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader: This is a great story, the kind of story Americans love, the kind of story you get only once in a while in college basketball. A young team from a remote place on the map (Tucson) and a remote place in the NCAA tournament draw (No. 4) rises up, wins it all. Nobody forecasts it. Nobody even thinks about it.

It plays a marvelous overtime title game with the defending champion, and it forces the team that runs everybody out of gas to run out of gas itself. It beats everybody else at everybody else’s game.

Arizona was watchable and likable. It was a small band of guys with trick-the-eye quickness, seemingly reaching in to everybody’s passing lane. It wouldn’t even let Wayne Turner, who has penetrated past everybody for Kentucky, penetrate. In the age of quickness of might, guards over big men, Arizona was a fitting champion.

Arizona was just better than everybody else, and who knew?

Dale Hofmann,

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: This will always be the Final Four that fooled most people and thrilled everybody.

Only the sixth overtime game ever to determine a national collegiate basketball championship, this was as good as it gets â€Ļ

The country will forget about (Lute) Olson’s early exits now. But it will never forget about this tournament.

Tom Sorensen,

The Charlotte Observer: The players had no legacy, no reputation, no doubts. Arizona doesn’t start or play any upperclassmen. You know when we should have known the Wildcats had a great chance to win? It was seconds before the championship game began.

Arizona junior forward Bennett Davison walked to center court for the jump ball. Now this is a major, the championship is, like the World Series or the Super Bowl. And these are 20- and 21- and 22-year-olds, at least the 22-year-olds who have yet to leave for the NBA, who play it.

More than 47,000 fans in the RCA Dome are screaming and everybody else is watching on TV. The cameras are aimed straight at the players. What did Davison do?

He yawned.

So, Bennett — are we boring you?

No. And Bennett and the fellows didn’t bore us, either.

Jason Whitlock, Kansas City Star:

Great stories. Great emotion. Great action. Great drama. But no great teams.

That’s what we should remember about this college basketball season. That’s the message that emanated from this latest Final Four. That’s what transpired last night as Indianapolis’ RCA Dome when Arizona’s Wildcats ended Kentucky’s reign as college basketball’s regional champions, upsetting Kentucky’s Wildcats 84-79 in overtime.

But let’s don’t kid ourselves. The Arizona team that won last night wouldn’t stand a chance against the Christian Laettner-led Duke teams of the early 1990s or the Larry Johnson-led UNLV squads of the same period, or even the Fab Five-led Michigan Wolverines â€Ļ

Neither Arizona nor Kentucky had a claim to greatness.

Dave Hyde,

Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel: Arizona, so used to be first only alphabetically, needed a lesson in embracing the moment when it came into view numerically.

“Let’s not doubt now,” coach Lute Olson shouted to his team in overtime, in the RCA Dome, with one of the NCAA Tournament’s most unlikeliest champions ready to be crowned.

Olson need not have worried by then. Doubt was down for the night. Kentucky finally followed.

David Teel,

Newport News (Va.) Daily Press: History has not been kind to royalty. The original Boston Patriots tossed King George II’s tea into the harbor. The French lopped off Marie Antoinette’s noggin. Prince Charles dissed Princess Di.

But no one in college basketball has ever treated the game’s royalty as rudely as Arizona, your new national champion.

The Wildcats defeated defending titlist Kentucky 84-79 in overtime last night at the RCA dome to win the first title in program history. Add victories over Kansas and North Carolina en route to the championship game, and Arizona defeated college basketball’s three winningest programs during this NCAA Tournament.

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