One Shining Moment. #MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/Fn6ev4c1Km
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) April 3, 2018
The season might not have ended the way the Kansas men’s basketball team had hoped it would. But a quick glance at the annual tournament tradition that features some of the tourney’s best moments set to the tune of “One Shining Moment” shows, yet again, that Kansas had one heck of a season.
In all, the Jayhawks appeared in the video montage somewhere in the neighborhood of 12-16 times. The exact number depends upon how you count, whether you consider cuts of the same play/sequence as one entry or two and also whether you count the times when KU was lurking in the background.
Still, even if you’re a tough grader when it comes to those sorts of things, the Jayhawks got more than their fair share of air time during the One Shining Moment celebration.
And why not? Kansas made the Final Four, had some of the best players in the tournament and is an easily recognizable college basketball powerhouse. It’s one thing to limit the KU love to one or two shots during the years when they lose to Stanford in the second round. But limiting it during a Final Four run would be crazy.
Included in the good shining moments for KU in this year’s video were:
• An alley-oop dunk by Svi Mykhailiuk against Clemson.
• Devonte’ Graham’s alley-oop pass to Silvio De Sousa and the ensuing reaction by De Sousa in that same game.
• A close-up of Lagerald Vick pointing and smiling, presumably after a big 3-pointer.
• Nearly the entire possession — along with some reaction/celebration (think jumping and hugging Graham and Clay Young and a high-five and hug between Svi and Vick) after the game went final — when Malik Newman defended Grayson Allen on the final shot of regulation that sent the Elite Eight game against Duke to overtime.
• A close-up of Graham bouncing and smiling during a Kansas victory.
• A close-up of Newman slyly grinning, likely after his insane performance against Duke.
There were, of course, five or six highlight scenes — or lowlights, if you’re a KU fan — of Villanova running past the Jayhawks in Saturday’s Final Four game, as well.
Take the good with the bad, I guess. But there’s plenty of good Kansas moments in there to make the whole thing worth watching if you didn’t catch it live on Monday night.
