She was sipping a wonderful espresso, sitting outside in Paris at Les Deux Magots, leafing through the International Herald Tribune newspaper on a cool Saturday morning, March 18, 2006.
Sue Weaver turned the page and suddenly gasped. There was a picture of her friend Karen Terrell, back across the pond, standing and grinning amid a cheering crowd in an arena, holding up a sign with purple and orange lettering.
It read, “Cinderella Wears Purple!”
A day earlier, March Madness honed in on the Northwestern State Demons basketball team, creating a buzz that still won’t fade away.
Tonight, precisely 20 years later, the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame and Northwest Louisiana History Museum at 800 Front Street in Natchitoches is hosting an anniversary event commemorating that St. Patrick’s Day surprise.
The 14th seeded NSU Demons 64, No. 3 Iowa Hawkeyes, champions of the Big Ten Conference Tournament, the 15th ranked team in all the land, 63.
Tonight’s gathering starts at 6 o’clock, with a roundtable discussion tipping off a little after 6:30 including the now-iconic retired Demons’ coach Mike McConathy, players and team personnel, with audience participation encouraged.
Karen will be there, with her “Cinderella Wears Purple” sign. Other keepsakes will be shared and displayed, and guests will enjoy revisiting photos and video from that fabled Friday midday first-round upset.
Admission cost tonight? It’s free. That’s appropriate because when March Madness produces Cinderellas, they belong to all of us. The Final Four is almost always for blue-bloods only, but the inevitable stunners along the way, the bracket busters, make everybody but the losing team happy.
That was the vibe March 17, 2006 inside The Palace of Auburn Hills. On hand to share the contest with America was the already legendary CBS announcing crew of “Uncle” Verne Lundquist and Bill Rafterty. Lundquist’s wife Nancy had visited Natchitoches regularly as a Lincoln-Mercury regional rep, so Verne didn’t need a pronunciation primer and knew about small north Louisiana towns like Heflin and Boyce that produced the young men whose purple jerseys didn’t have their names on the back.
Vital note: low seeds from the one-bid leagues have a couple of advantages unique to the NCAA Tournament. The games are played on neutral courts. There are eight teams at every first-round site, and although the higher seeded teams almost always have more fans in the stands, the supporters of the other teams, and the casual fans there for spectacle, are hoping heavyweights fall.
When it seems possible, suddenly the brand name team finds most of the crowd is cheering for the other guys. It hardly seemed feasible with 8:29 remaining and the Hawkeyes in control, 54-37 – unless you remembered how NSU erased an 18-4 Iowa lead with a 17-2 run in the first half.
Unless you knew how the Demons had come from 20 down at halftime to win in overtime at Mississippi State three months earlier. Unless you had watched the team develop its trademark, huge lopsided runs, throughout a 25-7 season that included unlikely wins at Oklahoma State and over Oregon State. Even their losses went down to the wire.
Unless you recalled that more than one prominent college basketball analyst predicted a Northwestern win. A couple picked the Demons into the Sweet 16. One had them going to the Elite Eight. Point being, the “Demons of Destiny,” as tagged by radio play-by-play man Patrick Netherton, had the goods.
They did. On a dime … several dimes, actually, from shooting guard Luke Rogers and point guards Tyrone Mitchell and Keenan Jones. Big Mo turned Northwestern’s way as “Big Slim,” forward Clifton Lee, made Iowa “Fear the Fro.” He had one, and everybody noticed as he drained four 3-pointers and poured in 16 points in a 20-6 burst. Suddenly it was a one-possession game with two minutes left. Other than the black and gold Hawkeye fans, everybody else in the Palace was purple with excitement.
To find its place in the magic of March Madness, the game needed the finish it got – a 22-foot fallaway 3-pointer by senior Jermaine Wallace, over Iowa’s Adam Haluska, from the left corner, dropping through with half a second left.
The outcome was ranked No. 22 among the “25 Best Tourney Moments” in the past 25 years by SI.com editors. ESPN.com editors listed Wallace’s shot among the “Top 16 Game Ending Plays” in the last 30 years of NCAA tournament history. The winning play won the Pontiac Game Changing Performance award for that year’s tournament. Fan voting resulted in a $105,000 general scholarship donation by General Motors/Pontiac to Northwestern – students, not athletes, graduate each year thanks to that financial aid.
Footage was used in a Buffalo Wild Wings commercial a few years ago. It was scripted into an episode of CBS’s “The Young and the Restless” soap opera as a bit of snazzy cross promotion of the network’s March Madness coverage.
How special was it, really? As he made his retirement rounds in 2017, Lundquist was asked to rank his favorite tournament games over 40+ years at midcourt wearing a headset.
His top choice was obvious: 1992 Duke-Kentucky, the top two East Regional seeds, won by the Blue Devils 104-103 on the Christian Laettner buzzer-beater off Grant Hill’s 75-foot inbounds pass with 2.1 seconds to go in overtime.
Uncle Verne’s Number 2: NSU 64, Iowa 63. When he got back to the hotel that night, after calling three subsequent games, he called Nancy, as always. She asked, “Honey, did the team from Natchitoches win?”
Those memories will bubble up again tonight, as they always do, not only around this neighborhood, every Big Dance.
Contact Doug at sbjdoug@gmail.com
