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So let's get the fun part of this post out of the way: Iowa State was without Georges Niang, but rallied back from a five-point deficit late to win against North Carolina, thanks to a virtuoso performance by DeAndre Kane. The 6'4 senior guard finished with 24 points, 10 rebounds and seven assists, and he iced the game with this layup:
But after the ball went through the hoop, things got weird:
As you can see, UNC inbounds the ball to freshman guard Nate Britt who tried to sprint up court and call a timeout.
Things get weird, though. The clock doesn't start for, oh, a second after he gets the ball, and it doesn't stop when he signals for timeout with about 0.5 seconds left. Perhaps the clock operator, realizing his initial error, tried to correct his mistake ... but that's not really how things work.
This led to both sides arguing that something should happen -- ISU wanted the game over, UNC wanted 0.5 or so left on the clock. We got this:
— Luke Zimmermann (@lukezim) March 23, 2014
It was eventually ruled that he wouldn't have been able to call the timeout had the clock been properly run, and that the game was over.
UNC fans shouldn't be too mad -- everything was resolved logically, and the best-case scenario would've been down two with 0.5 seconds left, needing an inbounds. (Which is not a particularly good situation.) Ideally, Britt would've just heaved the ball instead of letting the clock operator/refs have anything to do with it, but as a 3-for-12 shooter from beyond the arc, one can understand why he was a tad reticent.
Long story short: we had about 39 minutes, 58 seconds, and about another half a second of awesome, awesome basketball, and people are going to get really caught up on something that took place in the final 1.5 seconds that didn't really affect the game in any way.