SPOKANE, Wash. — This San Diego State is unfair. This San Diego State is not cool, especially when all the opponent has going for it is a fairy tale. This version showed up Sunday and put together a comprehensively unkind performance, making happy and hopeful Yale miserable for almost every second of it. San Diego State did what it usually does defensively. It also did what it almost never does offensively. It had James Jones, the Bulldogs’ coach, staring at the floor and exhaling deeply a lot.
It is one thing to get drawn into a rock fight with the Aztecs. It is quite another when they have all the rocks.
The reward, though, wasn’t the 85-57 win or the soured body language of a vanquished opponent or even the last spot in the NCAA Tournament’s round of 16. It was what lay beyond, on a night when San Diego State approached its perfect self. It was UConn. Again.
Running back the 2023 national championship game on Thursday night. Revisiting any and all regrets and having the opportunity to address them. UConn very possibly is better than it was last April. San Diego State very definitely looked terrifying in its own right four days before this rematch. It is probably no accident that Brian Dutcher, self-proclaimed man of singular focus on the next opponent, seemed singularly focused on the next opponent about 15 minutes after his team left the Spokane Arena floor.
“We’re heading to play a road game against UConn in Boston,” the Aztecs coach said in his opening statement during the postgame debrief, “and I’ve got a group that I think will be up for the task.”
All pretense dropped in a hurry. Of course San Diego State noticed that UConn was the No. 1 overall seed a week earlier. Of course San Diego State computed who likely would be waiting if it could manage two wins in Spokane. Of course San Diego State started thinking about what it did to the overall No. 1 seed last year — it beat Alabama, to jog everyone’s memories — and the confidence it can squeeze out of that precedent.
Of course everyone remembered what it felt like to fall well short — by 17 points in the 2023 title game, but who’s counting — on the last day of the previous season, to watch the confetti fall for someone else.
“A little bitter taste in our mouths,” is how Aztecs star Jaedon LeDee put it Sunday, and, sure. Just a little.
“We’re just excited we get another crack at them,” Aztecs guard Darrion Trammell added moments later. “They won a national championship last year, but I feel like we were right there. To get another chance at it, I think we’re up for the opportunity. We have the team to do it.”
GO FURTHER
San Diego State enters UConn rematch ‘up for the task’ after finding a new, scarier gear
