Arizona's Miles Simon hoists the ball aloft as Arizona beat Kentucky 84-79 in overtime to win the 1997 national championship.

 Ed Reinke, Associated Press 1997

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

INDIANAPOLIS — The game never really ends now. It is in your heart forever, unceasing, a moment in time never to be forgotten.

You will summon to mind the glow of a three-week crusade in which Arizona’s unprecedented run against the royal family of college basketball — Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky — became one of the most remarkable testaments to heart and poise in the history of the game.

If you live in Tucson you will never have to say, “Damn, that should have been us.” Now you will know what it is to be No. 1, and now you know that the winning exceeds the wanting.

“It was such a war,” said Miles Simon, who, in the mad month of March, became the best amateur basketball player in the world. “It is the hardest thing I have ever done.”

If you ever wanted to know what it is like somewhere over the rainbow, it is something like this: Lute Olson stood on the champions’ platform on the middle of the court at the RCA Dome last night, his wife’s red lipstick smeared around his mouth, a national title cap pulled taut over his mussed-up hair.

“Three No. 1 seeds went down,” he said into the P.A. microphone, his eyes misting over. He said no more. The reaction from the 4,000 Arizona fans drowned out whatever else it was he wanted to say.

The holy trinity of Arizona basketball (or at least a passable version of it) crowded into the UA dressing room and let it be known that they, too, belonged to this championship party. Sean Elliott, Steve Kerr and Jud Buechler, denied the national title nine years ago in a suffocating blob of hurt in the 1988 Final Four, wanted to get a closer look at this fourth-seeded team that hardly did anything the easy way, which is precisely their charm.

“Losing (in ’88) still hurts, it’ll always hurt,” said Kerr, “but this takes away a lot of the sting.”

So in the end, Arizona’s last game was its best game. It beat Kentucky 84-79 in overtime, never tapping the brakes, always advancing, refusing to submit to Kentucky’s battalion of all-stars.

The chroniclers of this game will now have to revise history. No longer is Villanova’s 1985 title unchallenged as the most inspiring, most unexpected championship ever. ’Nova, a No. 8 seed, beat two No. 1 seeds and the defending national champion, Georgetown, for the title.

Arizona’s route to the championship is, at worst, a photo finish for the top spot.

“This was one of the all-time marches,” said UA assistant coach Phil Johnson. “Beating Kansas was like a national championship game to me. And then beating North Carolina was like a national championship game, too. It’s almost like we had three national championship games. Every game was a mountain to climb and I think that’s why we won it all. We prepared for every game like it was the game.”

There will be no clamor for a refund.

Each of Arizona’s six victories were excruciatingly tense. Two overtimes. Two more required comebacks from double-figure deficits in the final seven minutes. And two chess matches in which Olson moved his pieces to the right places before Dean Smith and Rick Pitino could figure it out.

“I may be a little bit biased,” Olson said, “but I wish I could’ve been there as a spectator. It seemed to have everything you could want.”

If Jermel President of College of Charleston makes a 12-foot jumper with four seconds remaining two weeks ago, Arizona goes home with a 20-10 record, a fifth-place Pac-10 team with reasonably good feelings about the season.

But Jermel President missed. Of such tales are championship made.

Last night, Simon and Mike Bibby, the best backcourt in college basketball — and who would’ve thought that four weeks ago? — were superb. Most national champions find The Man to lead them through the six-game gauntlet. Arizona found The Men.

Bibby’s 6-0 run through the tournament was unsurpassed for performances-under-duress. It was as if, with five minutes to go, game slipping away, Olson would flip a switch and Bibby with bury a trey, beat a press, make a half-dozen free throws.

He became the first freshman point guard in history to start for a national champion. He wasn’t even sure he believed it.

“We thought we had a chance next year,” he said, “but not this year.”

Arizona’s Road to Indianapolis actually began 14 years ago, on a warm April morning at McKale Center. That’s when Cedric Dempsey, the school’s athletic director, broke the bank to hire Olson away from Iowa.

Last night, Dempsey, now the executive director of the NCAA, stood at midcourt watching the UA cut down the nets, taking in the show.

“When I hired Lute,” he said, “we talked about the opportunity to win a championship some day. Did I really think it could be done? Sure, that’s why I hired him. I really did.

“If you look at it, Lute has been the country’s most successful coach over the last 10 years (he is No. 1 in winning percentage) and I felt that under the right circumstances, he would someday get it done.”

The right circumstances, believe it or not, was the strangest confluence of all: a team with no seniors, a game shy of the Pac-10’s second division, chopping down the game’s redwoods, one after another, one as sure as another.

In the most important game in UA history, Donnell Harris and Bennett Davison made the plays in overtime that brought it to fruition.

On the bus from the team hotel 90 minutes before the game, Sean Elliott climbed aboard and delivered a final message. “Make sure you have fun,” he told them. “Don’t make this bigger than life.”

But by beating Kentucky, at least for a few weeks or months, Arizona’s basketball program takes on a larger-than-life aura. They will visit President Clinton at the White House. They will return home this afternoon to a parade and pep rally that may overflow the 58,000 seats at Arizona Stadium.

“I heard school is going to be closed on Wednesday,” Davison said. “I bet they’ve never done that before for a basketball team.”

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Star sports columnist Greg Hansen can be reached at 573-4362. His e-mail address is ghansen@azstarnet.com