Zags find heart on the bench

So did he or didn’t he? Get a piece of that last shot, that is.

Give Erroll Knight this: unlike his buddy Adam Morrison, who’s been sticking to the same story about that game-winning 3-pointer off the glass way back in January, when the tapes were rolling and the pens were cocked Monday night, he came clean.

“I was trying to go for the block,” Knight admitted. “But I got there slightly late and he just kind of doinked it, I guess.”

Doinked it.

Poor Chris Ayer will have to live with that – a clean layup in the final ticks of the clock that could have brought down the Gonzaga Bulldogs and sent their congregation into yet another overwrought panic. A clean layup that could have turned Loyola Marymount into instant Cinderella, the best NCAA Tournament story around for the next week or more.

A clean layup that could have driven a stake through this Evil Empire melodrama that seems to have taken hold of the entire West Coast Conference and managed to turn the league tournament into something that felt more like a toothache.

But Ayer doinked it.

In much the same way the Zags very nearly doinked the WCC title game in the most embarrassing way possible, only to rescue themselves with a most remarkable comeback.

Oh, the panic will still ensue – you can probably detect the smoke over Spokane even now – but the Bulldogs are champions once again by virtue of a 68-67 victory and their own considerable will.

That’s seven in the past eight years for the Zags, but none have cooked up such a potent stew of relief, elation and deliverance as this one.

For starters, it happened at home in the McCarthey Athletic Center after years of Gonzaga carping and cajoling about giving someone outside of California a chance to host the tournament.

There’s been the local drumbeat that the Bulldogs simply haven’t dispatched their WCC rivals with enough ease, given their lease in the Top 25 high-rise.

There was the Greek chorus of San Francisco coach Jessie Evans and other misanthropes who decided this was the perfect time to assault the integrity of the league’s referees and lump them into a conspiracy that’s supposedly keeping Gonzaga’s domination alive.

And then there were the banana-peel sneakers the Zags came out wearing Monday night, which had them spinning in a 15-point rut with just 13 1/2 minutes to go.

No wonder once Ayer aired his layup and time expired in the scramble that tournament MVP Morrison was moved to scale the scorer’s table, upraised arms open to drink in the last drop of love from the McCarthey maniacs.

As some of the glow faded, the Zags weren’t afraid to face what went so terribly wrong – a troubling lack of energy, the out-of-synch offense, the indifferent defense and Loyola’s vastly superior sense of want-to.

Another courageous effort by center J.P. Batista – another double-double on one good leg – was applauded, but how his limitations impacted the Gonzaga attack was cited only in passing.

“And I’m not too pleased about leaving guys wide open under the basket at the end of the game on back-to-back nights,” coach Mark Few admitted.

Some things need fixing. The Zags have a week in the shop.

But what can’t be debated is that in this season of high- intensity expectation, the Bulldogs have distilled the very essence of simply getting it done – 27 times.

“We know how to get victories,” Knight said. “We’ve been there before. What makes this team great is that we just keep sawing wood. And that’s everybody.”

This time it required Few to try a slew of different combinations until he hit on backups of Knight, Jeremy Pargo and David Pendergraft off the bench alongside Morrison and Batista. This was the group that wiped out that 15-point deficit, and no moment defined their approach better than when Morrison hit the deck to make a steal and pushed the ball into the hands of Pargo, who flipped a little lob to Knight for a thunderous dunk.

Few was stirred by the contributions of the bench trio – “they drew a line in the sand,” he said – but even more by the message sent by his MVP.

“Not in my house,” Few said. “When you see your star selling out, everybody else has to bring it.”

The flipside of all this joy, of course, was Loyola’s despair – best articulated by guard Brandon Worthy, who confessed that “This is probably the most devastating feeling I’ve ever felt.”

The Lions played well enough to be the unlikely champions, except that they came up a champion’s play short.

Knight was understanding, but only to a point.

“They could taste it,” he said, “but they can’t have it.”