John Blanchette: Zags reached peak but had nothing left when it arrived

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – There’s been a lot of amateur discussion this week about how the NCAA tournament needs tweaking. More teams, no play-in game, making the NIT the loser’s bracket.

Here’s another suggestion:

Sometimes, one game needs to eliminate both teams.

Under the current rules, however, only one team goes and Thursday evening it was Gonzaga, and there was no debate.

The Bulldogs have played their share of thrillers in the NCAAs and, rarely, the odd turkey. Indiana’s 70-57 victory in the first round at Arco Arena was bereft not only of thrills but also of beauty, pace and expectation that either of the combatants would be much more than a speed bump in the second round for UCLA – although of course the same was said of California a week ago.

It seemed almost to be a glitch of the calendar, a November game teleported to March.

“Or like watching fall practice,” said Gonzaga coach Mark Few. “There were days like this, watching guys miss 1-inchers and not make shots.

“It was a bad time of year to play a stinker, but we did. That wouldn’t have won a league game.”

But then, there hasn’t been a single typical thing about this Gonzaga season, and that includes the vein of character the Bulldogs mined this last month. Even the ending was abnormal – the first time the Zags have lost an NCAA opener as a lower seed.

Another lucky charm that can be stowed in a dresser drawer.

It was no trick to find the flaws in this game – the 34 percent shooting (“more easy shots than I’ve ever seen us miss,” said Few), the minus-15 licking the Bulldogs took on the boards, the poor start in defending Indiana’s 3-point shooters and a run of bricked breakaway layups early in the second half that could have changed the course of the game.

“It’s the old joke – great surgery but the patient died,” Few said. “And almost to a man, our new guys didn’t handle this NCAA game very well. They had a glazed look about them, like they were playing maybe not to make a mistake or a little passive.”

Indiana, knocked out by the Zags in the second round last year, played better and smarter, their guards more willing to make an extra pass for a better shot. And that’s just one obvious difference in having Kelvin Sampson as your coach instead of Mike Davis.

“These kids have been through a lot these last few years,” said Sampson. “To have something good happen to them has made this pleasurable.”

Few knows how he feels.

One of the toughest acts in sports is reconciling a season of uncommon achievement with an ugly coda. Maybe the task is easier this time.

Yes, these Zags won the fewest games of any Gonzaga team in a decade. They also played the most abusive schedule in school history, endured the departure of the most prominent player to the NBA and survived the most disturbing emotional jolt the program has seen.

The jag the Zags went on afterward – the small-ball, band-of-brothers act to win the West Coast Conference, league tournament and NCAA berth – was as remarkable as any in Gonzaga basketball, short of that initial Elite Eight breakthrough in 1999.

“I just think when our character really, really had to shine through, it shined as bright as it ever has since I’ve been at Gonzaga,” Few said. “We’ve never had our backs pressed that hard against the wall that I can remember. It sounds kind of cheesy, but you hope and pray your team responds like that when it has to.

“And that streak we’ve got going in the NCAAs is something we take a lot of pride in. It’s not a gimme. A Syracuse and a UConn and teams like that are finding that out. Those are some pretty storied programs that didn’t make it back this year.”

That said, this may have been the first of Gonzaga’s 10 trips to the NCAAs that came off as an anticlimax.

The players surely didn’t view it that way – there was never a just-happy-to-be-there feeling, nor has there been in any of their NCAA appearances. But early on Thursday night you could see the look of a team that was emotionally spent, that didn’t have another assault in it because it had scaled an Everest just to get into the bracket.

“It’s always kind of tough at the end,” said senior Sean Mallon. “When I look back on it, you have to be kind of positive about the whole thing. This year has been the toughest I’ve had by far to go through in basketball, with all the stuff we had to deal with.

“If you look at the whole year instead of one game, you have to feel pretty good about it.”

But in the tournament, you only get to look at one game – and the next one you either get to play or you don’t.

It’s the part of the tournament that will never get tweaked.