Blanchette: Gonzaga needs Sweet 16 for extra validation

SEATTLE – Now that we’re done with the most underappreciated achievement in sports …

Speaking, of course, about winning a round-of-64 game in the NCAA tournament.

Everyone gets all jazzed about those second-round upsets that put the Madness in March, and forget about them by the morning SportsCenter. A salmon left out in a 100-degree sun has a longer shelf life. Even the play-in winners get to enjoy a glow, just by virtue of there only being two a night. Heck, Friday’s winners are instant afterthoughts because there are new ones less than 24 hours later who are already in the round of 16.

No wonder our old friend Jud Heathcote, who coached Michigan State to an NCAA title and now watches Gonzaga play from Section 114 at McCarthey Athletic Center, has stumped for a label to slap on the Thursday-Friday winners.

“Who named the Sweet 16?” he once asked. “Some media guy.

“The Elite Eight came out of that. If you play a first-round game and win, you know what you are? The same as if you play a first-round game and lose. You get no recognition whatsoever and winning a game in the NCAAs is a big deal.”

Problem is, there’s no easy alliterative hook for 32, like finding a rhyme for bulb or borscht.

Of course, some people think this is strictly a Gonzaga problem.

So now we’ve reached the reckoning – the second-seeded Bulldogs against No. 7 seed Iowa for a plane ticket to Houston and the Sweet 16, and a place in the conversation for another week.

A place the Zags haven’t occupied for six years.

This has somehow sent self-esteem plummeting to record lows in Spokane, thanks to the poison arrows from out there in Neener-Neener Land. So identified have the Zags become for their first-weekend exits that a Twitter barrage in the wake of top-seed Villanova’s upset loss Saturday identified the victims as the “Gonzaga of the East,” among other dirt clods.

This circumstance likely draws a wry smile in the Iowa locker room, as the Hawkeyes’ romp over Davidson on Friday was the school’s first NCAA tournament victory – any round – since 2001.

“Some programs, they get spoiled,” Iowa center Gabriel Olaseni said. “They get multiple wins or they go to the Final Four and Elite Eight appearances. We hadn’t won a game in over 10 years. So we really value it. We just don’t want to stop there.”

Nor do the Zags, naturally.

Yet as much as coach Mark Few insists neither he nor the other principals of Gonzaga basketball are consumed with destinationitis, you can sense some urgency over today’s game.

“That first win has become undervalued,” Bulldogs assistant Tommy Lloyd said, “but I also think, at some point, in order to stop the chatter you have to win the next one. You can’t just keep saying, ‘What we’ve done is great’ – even though it is.

“There’s no pressure in that, I don’t think. It’s just what you want to do.”

It is true that four of GU’s five straight round-of-32 defeats have come to 1, 2 or 3 seeds, but the truth is the Bulldogs put up a fight in only one of those – and that a No. 1 was upset in the 32 three of those years. That Wichita State advanced to the Final Four when it knocked off the top-seeded Zags in 2013 is a rather hollow consolation, too.

Everyone wants to know how 2015 might be different. Zags guard Kyle Dranginis points to well-invested seniors Kevin Pangos and Gary Bell Jr. and a “different level of determination because it’s their last shot.”

But Lloyd doesn’t believe there’s extra baggage in the locker room.

“This team is exactly where we expected it to be,” he said, “and we don’t expect to be done. We know we have our hands full with Iowa, but we also know if we go out and play well, we can get the result we want.”

There’s a funny notion among Zags supporters that because the early success of this run came as low seed, the program would be better off as old-days underdogs. No one seems to grasp the irony of suggesting the team be, well, worse.

“Obviously, the more times you can be a higher seed, the more you’re going to increase your chances of breaking through,” Lloyd said.

It’s a silly exercise anyway. This tournament is all about belief, right? Iowa might be five seeds lower than Gonzaga, but that matters how?

“We’re from the Big Ten,” Iowa coach Fran McCaffery said, “and I don’t think anybody in the Big Ten looks at themselves as underdogs.”

And they’re not. They have more good wins than do the Bulldogs this season.

“I don’t expect people to understand how it is,” Lloyd said “You can try to educate them, but I don’t think they want to be educated on that. They just want results.”

And it’s that time, again.