Tonight’s NCAA national championship game between storied basketball programs Kentucky and Kansas probably won’t top the 1992 East Regional final between Duke and Kentucky. Sportswriter and ESPN columnist Gene Wojciechowski meticulously recaps that March Madness landmark twenty years later in The Last Great Game: Duke vs. Kentucky and the 2.1 Seconds that Changed Basketball.
You’ll likely recall this contest or maybe you’ve seen the famous pass and shot this year in a UPS commercial as the perfect example of “logistics.” I was a sophomore on the Kentucky campus at the time and, like so many others throughout the Commonwealth, anxious to see the Wildcats emerge from shame and rebuilding. The game took place in the Philadelphia Spectrum. Wojciechowski couldn’t have offered a more appropriate metaphor than his comparison to the fictional fight that took place in the same arena, “Kentucky was Rocky Balboa. Duke was Apollo Creed.”
