ARLINGTON, Tex. — Either youth will be served or it will be served up in Monday’s national championship game between Kentucky and Connecticut at AT&T Stadium.
The Wildcats (29-10) will be starting five freshmen and playing seven in their first eight as they go for their ninth national crown. The last team to start five freshmen in a title game is one of college basketball’s best known — Michigan’s Fab Five — but it lost the 1992 title game to Duke.
For UConn (31-8), reaching this title game has been two years in the making. The Huskies were a 20-win team a year ago but were barred from the NCAA Tournament, a penalty for poor classroom performance. Some like senior Niels Giffey tried not to watch last year’s tourney, angry to not be participating.
“All the trials and tribulations that we have been through, throughout last season and this season, just have prepared us for this moment,” sophomore Phillip Nolan said.
Seventh-seeded UConn has a pair of holdovers from the 2011 national championship team in Giffey and Shabazz Napier, a role player then but the tournament’s best player now.
John Calipari can win his second title in three years at Kentucky with an entirely different cast, an undeniable achievement for a coach often seen as an outlaw because of a trail of NCAA violations.
UConn second-year coach Kevin Ollie even brought the Huskies to AT&T Stadium in January when the team was in Dallas to face SMU. “I wanted them to come and just see where we can actually be on . . . Monday,” Ollie said. “I just wanted them to have a vision.”
Kentucky probably couldn’t have imagined getting here after seeing its road on Selection Sunday, when it drew a No. 8 seed. The ’Cats have run the gauntlet, beating three of the teams from last year’s Final Four. It ended top-seeded Wichita State’s unbeaten season, ousted defending national champion and No. 4 Louisville, and prevailed over Big Ten champion and No. 2 Michigan. Then it took down No. 2 Wisconsin by a point Saturday night on Aaron Harrison’s 3-pointer with 5.7 seconds to play, a near-replay of his game-winning shot against Michigan six days earlier.
The Wildcats have won their five NCAA games by a total of 18 points in what could stand as the most brutal run to the title ever.
And yet they are now exactly where they were expected to be. Kentucky was the preseason No. 1 team in the nation before a roster of seven probable pros struggled meshing and finished the regular season unranked.
“Some things were missing . . . chemistry things,” Harrison said. “Coach emphasized playing for each other. We didn’t know how, we were all the stars of high school teams and shot the ball 25 times. Losing ourselves in the team made us great.”
With point guard Napier at the Huskies’ helm, UConn’s run has drawn relentless comparisons to what Bronx product Kemba Walker did with the program three years ago. Walker will be at Monday’s game.
Napier has used phrases like “finding our own path” in an attempt to differentiate this team, but on Sunday he couldn’t help but admit he tapped into what he learned as a role player in 2011.
“I’d be stupid not to emulate the stuff he does,” Napier said of Walker. “He played tremendous my freshman year. So, a lot of things I do (are) what Kemba did. But I try to put my own spin on it.”
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