PORTLAND — Memories of Tyus Edney, anyone?
Gonzaga’s Demetri Goodson scored on a bank-shot floater with .9 seconds left that sealed the Bulldogs’ 83-81 win to push them into the Sweet 16, only after Western Kentucky had tied the game on a tip-in with 7.9 seconds left in the game.
“That’s his shot,” GU guard Micah Downs said.
I don’t know if it was a designed option. … He made a good decision.”
Cut to when the media walked into the locker room. There is a mandatory 10-minute “cooling off” period where media can’t be in there, but then it opens for a half hour.
When the media horde walks in, about 15 people strong, the entire Gonzaga team is standing in front of a monitor that is showing the final sequence.
When Goodson hit the shot, everyone did a little celebration again, not even realizing that there were about six cameras recording it.
“He works on that shot all the time in practice,” forward Austin Daye said.
Goodson himself couldn’t be a part of the celebration — he was being whisked to the interview platform with teammates Matt Bouldin and Jeremy Pargo and head coach Mark Few.
When he came back, he couldn’t even get inside the locker room doors, as the media were waiting for him.
“I was very shocked at the shot I got,” said Goodson, who said the last time he made a game-winning shot, he was a seventh-grader.
Western Kentucky was led by Orlando Mendez-Valdez’s 25 points and A.J. Slaughter’s 24. Mendez-Valdez shot 7-for-10 from three-point range.
“They were a handful,” Downs said. “He can shoot the heck out of the ball.”
Daye went to crash the boards on Goodson’s coast-to-coast drive.
“You think you’re going into overtime, then a miracle shot goes in,” he said.
