In my Cinderellas Guide, I wrote about High Point’s Chase Johnston, who is part of the modern-day trend of college hoopers who literally do not attempt two-point shots. (Shoutout to 2024 March Madness hero Jack Gohlke and his predecessor at Oakland, the incredibly-named Max Hooper.) Sure enough, Johnston lit up Wisconsin from deep, going 3-for-3 from three in the game’s final five minutes, including a shot from the halfcourt logo.

(Yeah, the NCAA Tournament has a really huge logo. Whatever. Still counting it.)

Johnston is literally on the team just to shoot threes. And his commitment to not doing anything else set him up for the biggest bucket of his life. Watch the defensive possession here. With High Point trailing by one, Johnston called for his teammates to swap onto Wisconsin star Nick Boyd so that he could guard someone who definitely wasn’t going to touch the ball.

When Wisconsin missed the shot, he didn’t try to rebound the ball (heading into the NCAA Tournament, he was on an 11-game no-rebound streak dating back to January 23rd.) Instead, he sprinted the other way down the court, past the foolish Wisconsin players who were foolishly trying to anticipate where the ball would go.

That left Johnston all alone behind the defense for the go-ahead fast-break layup — his first two-pointer of the season, and the game-winner in the biggest upset of March so far.

This was High Point’s first NCAA Tournament win in school history. Last year, the Panthers made their first-ever trip to the tournament, where they lost to Purdue. The team immediately scattered after that loss. Head coach Alan Huss went back to his alma mater, Creighton, where he’ll take over as head coach when Greg McDermott retires. Leading scorer Kezza Giffa went to Ole Miss; their 7-footer Juslin Bodo Bodo went to Baylor.

And yet! High Point quickly rebuilt, won a few more games than last season, earned a higher seed in this year’s NCAA Tournament, and beat Wisconsin.

Head coach Flynn Clayman used his post-game interview to cut a promo on behalf of the little guy. He lamented that his school was unable to schedule any quality opponents from major conferences this season, seemingly still mad even after the huge upset his team had just accomplished. (Big “I’D LIKE TO KNOW WHERE LOU HOLTZ IS RIGHT NOW” energy.) He continued talking about his team’s scheduling issues during his post-game press conference.

The idea that High Point is a poor little overlooked nobody probably sounds awful funny to everybody else in the Big South conference. The Panthers are the big bad of the Big South. They opened a $170 million arena in 2021, in a league where some arenas look like high school gyms. Their NIL spending reportedly dwarves the rest of the league, and — I cannot stress this enough — their students get to eat in a school-run on-campus steakhouse as part of their meal plan. High Point rebuilt so quickly in part because it’s rich. Bigger schools took their best guys, so they took smaller schools’ best guys.

But maybe that’s why the NCAA Tournament works. We pitch it as Big Guys vs. Little Guys. But the teams filling out the field aren’t nobodies! High Point won 30 games this year! They’re just somebody else’s monsters. They’ve spent all years racking up wins and dominating their leagues in relative anonymity.

In the not-so-distant past, it felt like a school with as much on-court success as High Point would be a part of every fan’s lexicon. But as the monied schools separate from everybody else, teams like High Point get relegated to the periphery for most of the season — kinda like Chase Johnston, living his entire life 30 feet from the rim. You might not even see a team like High Point until it’s March and they’re headed directly for the rim, about to knock your team out of the tournament.

Siena is coached by Gerry McNamara, a Syracuse legend who ran point for the 2003 national championship team and led the Orange to a memorable 2006 Big East tourney title.

Sure enough, McNamara coaches a quirky game exactly like his old coach at Syracuse, Jim Boeheim. The Saints play a 2-3 zone, they play as slowly as possible, and the teams’s starters stay on the floor as long as they humanly can.

McNamara’s plan was to leave his five starters on the court for the entire game. The starters played all 40 minutes. He did make a sub with 10 seconds left to get senior Brendan Coyle a round of applause. If he hadn’t, it would’ve been the first NCAA Tournament game with no substitutions since 1979.

The starters-only strategy was partly due to necessity: The Saints’ bench was weak due to injuries and off-court issues. They lost one of their starters to injury in December, and another to a surprise ineligibility ruling based on an “institutional mistake” weeks before the tournament.

But BoeheimBall helps make short rotations (or no rotations) possible. The zone limits the amount of running you have to do on defense, and so does the slow pace. You put five guys who know how to play the zone on the floor and you keep them out there. It worked when Syracuse went to the 2016 Final Four while ranking 350th out of 351 teams in bench minutes … and in a six-overtime game when Jonny Flynn played 67 of a possible 70 minutes … and in McNamara’s own Big East Tournament run when he averaged 38 minutes per game. And it helped Siena get here. Gavin Doty played 116 of a possible 120 minutes in the MAAC Tournament.

The strategy almost worked. Duke kept chucking threes, shooting 5-of-26, instead of working their obvious talent advantages inside.

Siena’s idiosyncratic style helped until it hurt. The Saints hit a five-minute scoring slump down the stretch while Duke went on an 11-0 run. Siena deployed probably the smartest strategy possible to pull the upset, but it wasn’t enough.

Duke will try to shake this moment. The Blue Devils have got a national championship to win, and they need to quickly forget that they almost lost to one of the last teams in the field.

Siena will try to hold onto this performance forever. It’s going to be hard. The Syracuse job is open, and everybody assumes it belongs to McNamara. If he leaves, so will most of the Saints’ stars. They’ll be left with little more than memories and screenshots of the miracle that almost was.