WICHITA, Kan. — For Blue Cain and Silas Demary Jr., playing in the NCAA Tournament is the realization of a dream.
On Wednesday, the two Georgia guards scooped out rich images from their memory banks of the days when they imagined themselves on the magnificent stage that is the NCAA Tournament.
“Being in the driveway, counting down (the seconds), you miss the shot, you add a couple more seconds, do it again,” Cain said. “Absolutely. It really is a dream come true. I’m just excited to be here.”
For Demary, it was the excitement from when his teachers at Millbrook High in Raleigh, North Carolina, indulged students and allowed them to watch the tournament during class time.
“Just thinking while I’m doing work in class, like, ‘Man, I want to be there one day,’” Demary said. “’I pray and hope to be there one day.’ Just to finally be here, it’s just a dream come true, a blessing from God.”
In time, participating in March Madness might become more rote for the Bulldogs. Someday, coach Mike White’s program could be one that shows up regularly in the tournament. The Bulldogs last were here in 2015.
They last advanced past the first round in 2002. Since then, every other SEC team has won an NCAA game at least once, most making deeper inroads a number of times. Given the wealth of talent within the state’s borders and the resources available at Georgia, it long has been a puzzle why the Bulldogs could not do more.
But, if it is to be, the Bulldogs’ first-round matchup Thursday with Gonzaga in an 8-9 pairing is the first step.
Georgia’s first NCAA trip with White, now in his third season in Athens, is worth celebrating. But the difficult task of becoming a program that does more than pop up in the tournament a couple times per decade and quickly exits has begun. When the season ends, White almost certainly will lose potential lottery pick Asa Newell. The grueling SEC likely will remain so. The transfer portal and name, image and likeness money have made the challenge of building a consistent winner far more difficult.
But White doesn’t have to look far for inspiration. Gonzaga is making its 26th consecutive NCAA appearance (the third longest active streak in Division I) and is riding a streak of nine consecutive Sweet 16 appearances, tied for the longest such streak since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
Said Gonzaga coach Mark Few of maintaining such excellence, “It’s really, really, really hard.”
Should the Bulldogs (the red-and-black kind) make it past the Bulldogs (the mid-major variety), they’ll face No. 1-seed Houston, which has made the Sweet 16 five of the past six years and is a favorite to win the whole thing.
It’s difficult to imagine Georgia reaching that echelon. This is the Bulldogs’ 13th NCAA appearance in school history. The last time they earned bids in back-to-back seasons was in 2001 and 2002, achieved amid NCAA violations in the regime of coach Jim Harrick.
But, given its place in the SEC and the available support, what reason exists that it couldn’t? It’s certainly no more unreasonable than Houston having reached this point.
“Houston was in such horrible shape when we got there,” Cougars coach Kelvin Sampson said Wednesday. “The apathy. Nobody caring. Having to fight for scraps and scrums, doing all that. No one will ever have an idea of how difficult it was that first year. People that just showed up this year or last year, they have no clue. I can’t even relate to them, and they can’t relate to me, either.”
And, in Sampson’s fourth season, the Cougars turned the corner. That 2018 team made the NCAA Tournament, the school’s first in nearly a decade. Houston then won its first tournament game in more than 30 years before falling short in the round of 32.
As things would have it, those games were played in the same arena, Intrust Bank Arena, where Georgia will play Gonzaga on Thursday afternoon (after Houston plays Southern Illinois-Edwardsville at 2 p.m.). Sampson said that first tournament appearance in his tenure offered hope.
“I always thought that was the most important word in the Bible — hope,” Sampson said. “‘Hope’ is an amazing thing. And it gave us credibility that we were on the verge of doing something.”
On Wednesday, White declined an opportunity to share his gauzy daydreams of what could someday be.
“It’s one day at a time for us,” he said. “It’s growth. We’ve spent three years rebuilding, and we’re proud of where we are, but it’s about Gonzaga. That’s it. That is it. It’s about today and our preparation and playing really well.”
While White homes in on Gonzaga, hope bubbles anew at Georgia, engaging in madness once again.
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