By Jerry Ratcliffe
The Grim Reaper showed up at Purcell Pavilion on Tuesday night, fresh off the 90-minute Greyhound bus ride from downtown Chicago to frozen South Bend. Reaper’s mission was to ruin Virginia’s road trip with one simple wave of his scythe.
Seems to happen to every college basketball team. Roll into town as a 10-point favorite against an opponent that’s down and out, easy breezy, until the Reaper shows up and all hell breaks loose.
Most of Tuesday night went as Reaper planned. Notre Dame, which of late couldn’t beat anybody but a so-so Boston College team, minus its best player sidelined by injury, a 10-point underdog to Virginia, jumped on the Cavaliers early with no let up in sight.
UVA was still smarting from blowing a 16-point lead at home against North Carolina and dropping its first game at John Paul Jones Arena this season.
After watching Notre Dame bolting to a 21-11 lead before he could blink, Ryan Odom must have been thinking this just wasn’t going to be Virginia’s night. An ambush of sorts.
“We were reeling a little bit,” Odom said. “And that’s probably an understatement.”
The Virginia coach must have felt somewhat helpless during that Irish points blitz in the first half. Cole Certa, who averaged only 10 points a game, and Notre Dame coach Micah Shrewsberry’s son, Braeden, couldn’t miss.
Remember those old Michael Jordan and Larry Bird commercials for McDonald’s? Yeah, the ones where they were drilling impossible shots for a bag of Big Macs.
Bird: “Off the floor, off the scoreboard, no rim.” Swish.
Jordan: “Over the second rafter, off the floor, nothing but net.” Swish.
Jordan again: “Off the expressway, over the river, off the billboard, through the window, off the wall, nothing but net.” Swish.
That’s what it was like as Certa and Shrewsberry (who combined for 30 first-half points) bombed away. They were making everything they threw up. Certa actually hit one triple from the logo near midcourt. How do you stop that when the shooters are squaring up four or five feet behind the 3-point arc?
Certa nailed back-to-back triples to give the Irish their largest lead — 19 points — 39-20 with 6:05 to go in the first half.
If you turned the channel for a “Golden Girls” rerun at that point, you’re forgiven. The Reaper was loving it.
Odom didn’t throw in the towel. Nor did Thijs De Ridder or Chance Mallory, who did their best at chipping away at Notre Dame’s seemingly insurmountable lead. Those two Cavaliers scored 15 straight points to cut the Irish lead to single digits by the break (44-35 … see related game story for the blow-by-blow details).
Still, the Reaper was spotted grubbing on popcorn at halftime, everything on schedule in ruining Virginia’s night.
That’s until Sam Pierre Lewis, a native of nearby Chicago, showed up big for the rest of the night. We can call Lewis the “Reaper Cheater” after his mindblowing performance that saved Virginia’s bacon.
While his teammates continued the comeback of a lifetime, with De Ridder’s two free throws (he was 14 of 15 from the foul line, drawing 9 Irish fouls) gave Virginia the lead at 55-54 with nine minutes to go in regulation, Lewis was waiting for the big moment.
Notre Dame led 70-66 with less than a minute to play when Lewis drilled a huge 3-pointer and kept the Cavaliers within reach as the game headed to overtime, knotted at 73-all.
The teams leapfrogged one another in the second overtime until the Irish — off the strength of Certa and Shrewsberry — led 85-82 with 19 seconds to go.
On the following possession, Virginia appeared disjointed, so much that Odom thought about calling timeout, noting that “the play was kind of evaporating.”
Until the Reaper Cheater rose up again. Lewis, who was closely guarded, drilled a 3-pointer at the top of the key with only 3.5 seconds to go, tying the game at 85-85 and sending it into a second overtime.
“Bigtime play by Sam Lewis,” Odom said.
Lewis was impressed with his penchant to make the big shot, saying, “Yeah, super big. We had super momentum after that play. We knew, like, this is our game.”
That’s exactly what the Cavaliers did in the second extra period, but it required more Lewis heroics at the end to seal it. Leading 96-95 with 45 seconds to play and De Ridder, who had scored a career-high 34 points, fouling out, Lewis hit a jumper from the free-throw line for a 3-point lead, 98-95, with 15.7 seconds showing.
Certa, who also scored a career-high 34 points, finally missed a triple — and he was wide open — with 7.2 seconds to play after an Irish timeout.
It finally came down to Lewis. The Irish put him at the free-throw line with 5 seconds to play. He sank both foul shots for a 100-95 lead to ice No. 17 Virginia’s 17th win in 20 games.
The comeback was the Cavaliers’ biggest since also rallying from a 19-point deficit against Arizona on Nov. 12, 2006. It was not the biggest comeback in program history, however. The biggest was UVA’s comeback from a 23-point, second-half deficit at Duke in double overtime in January of 1995.
Speaking of history, De Ridder became the first Cavalier to score 30 or more points since Kyle Guy’s 30 vs. Marshall on New Year’s Eve, 2018.
Virginia, which is now 5-1 on the road, travels to icy Boston on Saturday.
At last glance, The Reaper was checking prices on a Greyhound to Boston.
