Patriotism at home

Jim Larranaga sat alone on a wooden bench inside a cramped locker room at Boise State Pavilion. He remained motionless as his somber players packed up to leave the building.

“I can’t believe we lost the game,” Larranaga said afterward.

George Mason and star George Evans had controlled the 2001 first-round game and even led by one entering the final minute. The Patriots were so close to the first NCAA tournament victory in school history and the first in Larranaga’s 15 seasons as a coach.

But it wasn’t to be: Steve Blake hit a go-ahead 3-pointer, third-seeded Maryland avoided a big upset and the Patriots left Idaho heartbroken.

That was five years ago, but the memory is fresh.

“The night we lost to Maryland, I laid in bed that night thinking, ‘How would it have been if we won?’” the 56-year old coach said. “Now I know.”

The loss to Maryland was the second time in three seasons the Patriots had made the NCAA tournament. It would take five seasons for George Mason to earn another shot at March Madness.

This time the Patriots not only closed out the first round with a win over perennial power Michigan State, but George Mason also knocked off defending national champion North Carolina en route to the Sweet 16. The 11th-seeded Patriots will meet No. 7 Wichita State tomorrow night at Verizon Center for a trip to the Washington Region final.

“I laid in bed in Dayton and thought to myself, ‘How would it have been if we won again?’” Larranaga remembers pondering after beating Michigan State. “This has been a great week for our George Mason family, the players, my coaching staff, my sons.”

Larranaga no longer has to wonder what it feels like to make a deep run in the NCAA tournament. The coach who took over a scandal-ridden and losing program nine years ago is now the wide-smiling man in the middle of a Cinderella Party.

And while Larranaga is beaming in the moment as Fairfax has suddenly become a basketball hotbed, it wasn’t really the vision he had when he took over for fired coach Paul Westhead in 1997.

“My goal was not to build a good team but to build a great program,” Larranaga said in his deliberate, thorough manner. “A good team is one that plays well that season. A great program is one that wins year after year after year. And we have been able to do that, maybe even better than I envisioned.”

Eight straight winning seasons and five postseason appearances, including two in the NIT, have made his point.

And he has done it his way, in which winning is not always the most important thing.

The most revealing moment of this remarkable run did not come when the Patriots earned a controversial at-large bid to the tournament or upset perennial power Michigan State. Nor was it was shocking the Tar Heels to become the first team from the Colonial Athletic Association to get that far since Richmond in 1988.

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