Today in Men's Basketball History: April 1

• All-American Juan Dixon lofted the basketball into the air and Johnny Holliday proclaimed, “The kids have done it!” as head coach Gary Williams Maryland etched its place in college basketball history by winning its first national championship with a 64-52 win over Indiana.
• Dixon scored 18 points on 6-of-9 shooting, while fellow senior Lonny Baxter posted 15 points and 14 rebounds in the victory.
• After defeating the highest possible seed on each step of its journey, including UConn and Kansas, the Terps were matched up with Cinderella 5-seed Indiana, which had defeated Duke earlier in the tournament.
• The Terps were in control for most of the game. Indiana drew close midway through the second half, but Dixon nailed a 3-pointer to put Maryland ahead for good with 10 minutes left in the game.
• Quotable: “I developed as a person, a basketball player. I feel like I’m dreaming right now because I’m part of a national championship team. I went out here and got better each year and led my team to a national championship. It’s a great feeling man. I’m speechless.” - Juan Dixon
  Quotable: “It’s a great feeling, except that I haven’t felt anything because I’m numb.” - Gary Williams
   

Associated Press Game Story

by Jim O'Connell. AP Basketball Writer

ATLANTA -- A star who stepped up and a tightly wound coach - a match made in Maryland, and good enough to turn the Terrapins into national champions.

With All-American guard Juan Dixon snapping out of a scoring drought just in time, Maryland ended Indiana's magical tournament run with a 64-52 victory Monday night.

This was the Terrapins' first appearance in a national championship game and the senior-laden lineup came through over the final 9:42, pulling away from the Hoosiers to become the fourth straight No. 1 seed to win it all.

Coach Gary Williams guided his alma mater from the depths of probation 13 years ago to the pinnacle of college basketball. He let his intense demeanor melt long enough to celebrate with his team, which featured four players who had started at least 100 games in their careers.

"We had to really grind it," he said. "It took us a good 25 minutes before we really ran our offense. Not many coaches get a chance to coach three great seniors like this. It was a thrill for me to watch these guys work hard and get their reward."

Dixon scored at least 27 points in four of the first five tournament games, including 33 in the semifinal win over fellow top seed Kansas. He started the title game at that pace, scoring 11 points in the opening 10 minutes. He didn't score again for 20 minutes.

When he hit a 3-pointer with 9:42 to play, it gave Maryland (32-4) the lead for good at 45-44 and the Terrapins made sure even a small lead was safe this time.

"I was trying to be patient," he said. "I was trying to let the game come to me. I hit a big shot."

Dixon finished with 18 points and he and fellow senior Lonny Baxter combined for all the points in the 9-2 run that Dixon started with the 3 and Baxter ended with a dunk that made it 51-46 with 7:22 to play.

"It's like I'm dreaming right now because I'm part of a national championship team," Dixon said. "A lot of people at home counted me out at home. But I got better each year."

Indiana (25-12), which upset top-seeded Duke then shocked second-seeded Oklahoma in the semifinals, just couldn't come up with another stunner.

The team that had the country almost forgetting about Bob Knight, again used the 3-point shot as its main weapon.

The Hoosiers, who were 23-for-32 from behind the arc in the regional final against Kent State and Oklahoma, made eight of their first 12 Monday night. When Jared Jeffries' layup was goaltended with 9:53 left, Indiana had its only lead of the game, 44-42.

When Dixon and Baxter, who finished with 15 points and 14 rebounds, stepped up, the long shots stopped falling. Indiana made just two of its 11 shots from behind the arc and its dream of being the first No. 5 seed to win a national championship started to fade.

Kyle Hornsby led Indiana with 14 points and Dane Fife added 11. Jeffries, the Big Ten's player of the year, finished with eight points on 4-for-11 shooting. The Hoosiers finished 20-for-58 from the field (34.5 percent), the first time in the tournament they shot below 50 percent.

The Terrapins, who won 19 of their last 20 games, again were big on the boards, finishing with a 42-31 rebound advantage.

"They were definitely physical," Jeffries said. "They did a good job of preparing for us on defense."

Maryland was among the country's highest scoring teams at 85 points per game, but its third-lowest total of the season was good enough to make it the 33rd school to win the national championship and the second straight from the Atlantic Coast Conference following Duke last season.

The loss was the first for Indiana in six national championship game appearances. The last three titles - 1976, 1981 and 1987 - were won under Knight, who was fired two years ago for violating a zero-tolerance policy. Mike Davis, one of his assistants, was selected to succeed him and in just his second season he almost won it all.

Dixon didn't miss a shot in the first half, going 4-for-4 from the field and 2-for-2 from the free throw line. His last shot came with 10:02 left and the baseline jumper gave the Terrapins a 21-11 lead.

Indiana's first 14 points came on four 3-pointers, two by Coverdale, and two free throws. The Hoosiers couldn't get a shot off in the paint and had to settle for outside shots.

After Drew Nicholas made two free throws to give Maryland a 25-16 lead with 7:59 left, the Terrapins missed eight straight shots, but Indiana was unable to take advantage of the cold spell and only trimmed two points off the lead.

Coverdale's drive at the buzzer brought the Hoosiers within 31-25.

CHAMPIONS

by Don Markus, Baltimore Sun
Published April 2, 2002

ATLANTA - The dark cloud that has hovered over the University of Maryland basketball program for most of the past two decades, in one way or another, finally disappeared last night. Maybe forever.

With a gritty 64-52 victory over Indiana at the Georgia Dome, the Terrapins completed their six-game run in the NCAA tournament to win the first national championship in the program's long and bumpy history.

Led by former Calvert Hall star Juan Dixon, who scored a game-high 18 points, Maryland (32-4) pulled away from a pesky bunch of Hoosiers in the final four minutes.

The victory was the most significant for Maryland coach Gary Williams, who nearly saw his own career jeopardized when he returned to his alma mater's troubled program in 1989 and led the Terps back to national prominence in the past eight years.

The championship came three months after the school's once- downtrodden football team reached the Orange Bowl, its first major bowl game in 25 years. It came one year after Maryland had lost to Duke in the semifinals of the Final Four in Minneapolis, a game in which the Terps blew a 22-point, first-half lead.

It seemed that Maryland was on the verge of watching another big lead, and an even bigger game, slip out of its hands last night. After cruising to a 12-point lead midway through the first half, the Terps fell behind with a little under 10 minutes left in the game.

Again, Dixon came to the rescue. Despite going nearly 20 minutes between baskets after making his first four shots of the game, Dixon hit a three-pointer to put Maryland ahead for good. It started a 17-6 run that sealed the game - and the title - for the Terps.

It was one of the sloppiest championship games in recent memory, dating back to North Carolina State's miracle win over Houston at the Pit in Albuquerque, N.M., in 1983. But the Terps will gladly give up style points and displayed the kind of grit that has become a trademark of Williams' teams.

When the final buzzer sounded, Dixon fired the ball into the air and fell into a bear hug to the floor with Lonny Baxter, whose defense and rebounding down the stretch in a 15-point, 14-rebound performance played a critical role in Maryland coming out of its funk.

With the arena bathed in red, it was difficult to tell which fans were rooting for the Terps and which were pulling for Hoosiers. The same could be said about the Olson-Ledford family, whose roots were in Maryland and Indiana.

Ron Olson has spent the past 40 years in Maryland and lives with his wife, Peg, in Annapolis, but he got his doctorate from Indiana in 1964 and later was on the faculty in College Park.

Jennifer Olson followed her father to Bloomington for college after attending Springbrook High School in Silver Spring. Before graduating from Indiana in 1993, she met native Hoosier Eric Ledford, who grew up in Indianapolis.

Brad Olson split his college years between Maryland and East Carolina, but he and his wife, Amy, were clearly pulling for the Terps. So were his parents. As for his sister, who sat with her Hoosier husband in the Maryland rooting section, there was some debate.

"I like to cheer for the underdog," said Jennifer Ledford.

Said Ron Olson: "They're going to be cheering for the underdog all night long."

University of Maryland President C.D. "Dan" Mote Jr. summed up the run of success the school has had, both athletically and academically, in the past year. But the feel of utter joy had to be tempered by some other events that have affected the campus in recent months.

"This has been a year of extremes," Mote said before the game. "Going to the Orange Bowl, and now the Final Four for the second straight year. But we also got hit by a tornado [in which two students died]. With 9-11, we had alumni killed. There's been both good and bad, but it would be like a dream for this to come true."

It was almost a surrealistic setting for many longtime Maryland fans to watch their beloved and once-beleaguered team play for a national championship. Just as they fretted when the Terps nearly blew a 20-point, second-half lead against Kansas in Saturday's semifinals, they seemed a little nervous last night.

"Just getting over the hump was hard," said Jim Spiro, a 1986 graduate who served three years as the team manager under coach Lefty Driesell. "We always seemed to run into the hot team, like Villanova in 1985. This year everything has come together."

Spiro, who now works as a salesman for a legal company in Washington, recalled growing up a Maryland fan and having to settle for the consolation prize, like winning the National Invitational Tournament. Spiro was in his seat two hours before game time, thinking of what it would mean to win the national championship.

"It would be getting to the top of the mountain," he said.

It was a mountain that the Terps began to climb when they reached the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament in 1994, the first of six trips at least the regional semifinals in the past nine years. But the foundation was built by players such as Tony Massenburg, who played on Williams' first team.

"I saw us turn the corner," said Massenburg, now in his 13th season in the NBA and a member of the Memphis Grizzlies. "It was just a matter of time before everything came together, before we got the players who could do this. I knew this was going to happen."

As she stood on the floor watching the post-championship celebration, athletic director Debbie Yow was like a lot of Maryland fans - in a state of euphoria.

"History in the making for the Terps," she said. "Unbelievable."

Asked if she was holding her breath the past few days, Yow said, "It felt like a great sense of anticipation, knowing you have the talent and determination to succeed. It felt very natural."

Someone remarked about the kind of year it has been for the Terps.

"We're not through," she said. "Lacrosse."

A STAGGERING ACHIEVEMENT STEADIED DOWN THE STRETCH BY THE UNFLAPPABLE JUAN DIXON, MARYLAND OVERCAME A MULTITUDE OF ERRORS TO WIN ITS FIRST NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP

by Seth Davis, Sports Illustrated
published on April 8, 2002

All night long, as his team bumbled and fumbled with an uncharacteristic lack of poise, Maryland coach Gary Williams scowled. He stomped. He screamed. And only when the game was over, when his players were celebrating and his two-year-old grandson, David, was perched happily in his arms, did Williams allow the widest of smiles to cleave his famously agitated face. "Can you say, Go Terps!" he asked, kneeling to face David on the Georgia Dome floor in Atlanta moments after Maryland had defeated Indiana 64-52 in Monday's NCAA final. Let the record show that David--cut from the same cloth as the hard-to-please Williams--simply tossed his red-and-white pom-pom into his grandpa's face.

Williams burst out laughing. How could he not, after his defense had smothered Indiana's inside game, limiting the Hoosiers to 10-for-35 shooting from two-point range? Or after his guards had flown at Indiana's three-point gunners, pushing them out to NBA range and beyond? Or after Terrapins guard Juan Dixon, the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four, had shown why he should have won player-of-the-year honors for the entire season?

Midway through the second half of the sloppiest championship game in ages, just after Indiana had erased a 12-point Maryland lead, Dixon pointed to his brother, Phil, in the stands and delivered a message. "It's all right, it's all right," Dixon mouthed. "I got it." Indiana forward Jared Jeffries soon gave the Hoosiers a 44-42 advantage, their first of the game, but from that point on, Dixon made good on his word. He sank a cold-blooded three-pointer over the outstretched hand of Indiana guard Tom Coverdale. Then, with guard Dane Fife draped like kudzu over his shoulder, Dixon drove to his left and drilled a preposterous fadeaway 15-footer, the two jumpers kick-starting a game-breaking 22-5 run. "I wasn't nervous at all," Dixon would say later. "I've been through tougher situations in my life. This was nothing. I knew we were going to win."

"A lot of guys can score 20 points, but then they run and hide during the last few minutes," a jubilant, sweat-soaked Williams said afterward. "Juan hits every big shot for us."

While winning Maryland's first national title, Williams showed that he's like a real-life terrapin: He may have a hard shell, but he's soft and vulnerable inside. Granted, Williams can be a raving, spitting, cursing maniac on the sidelines. For years the worst place to sit at a Maryland game has been on the bench, where the full brunt of his venom is often felt. In the semifinal against Kansas last Saturday, just before center Lonny Baxter reentered the game with two fouls, assistant coach Jimmy Patsos told him, "Don't get a foul, because I don't want to get screamed at for the next hour." What people fail to realize, though, is that if Williams's players thought he was truly abusive, his teams wouldn't win. "Some guys yell and scream, but their players don't reflect that intensity," says UConn coach Jim Calhoun, whose Huskies lost to Maryland in the East Regional final. "His teams reflect his intensity; that's what makes him a great coach."

Yet Williams's antics are misread more often than a treacherous downhill putt at Augusta. "I've always felt that's the tip of the iceberg with me," he said in a quiet moment last week. "I'm not quite what people think I am." Indeed, before practice at the Georgia Dome last Friday, Williams sneaked up on senior forward Byron Mouton, who lay on the floor of the Maryland locker room listening to music with his eyes shut, and quietly dripped water onto his face before scurrying off to hide in the bathroom. (Mouton never had a clue that Williams was the culprit.) The night before, at an NCAA event with the other Final Four coaches, Williams choked up and his eyes filled with tears as he sat onstage at the Fox Theater describing his love for his daughter, Kristin, and her son, David.

"People see Gary, and they think he's a wild man," says Big East Conference commissioner Mike Tranghese, one of Williams's closest friends. "I tell them Gary is one of the kindest people I know, and they think I'm lying."

Like Dixon, whose heroin-addicted parents both died of AIDS before he turned 18, Williams sought refuge from a turbulent home life in what he speaks of reverentially as "the game." From the time his parents divorced when he was 14, he lived in an all-male household in Collingswood, N.J., with his father, Bill, and his brothers, David and Doug. A check sorter at a bank, Bill was an intensely private, devout Presbyterian who had no interest in sports. Neither did Gary's mother, Shirley, who moved to California after the split, or his brothers. Though he worked with Doug on his father's funeral arrangements--Bill died in February of heart failure, the day before Maryland beat Duke in Cole Field House--neither brother has come to see Gary at the Final Four the past two years.

"We weren't one of those families that were really close," says Williams, a team captain and starting guard during his career at Maryland, from 1964-65 to '66-67, "but the game was always a constant in my life. My parents got divorced, but you could always go shoot a basketball if things weren't going well. The great thing about basketball is, if you have a ball and a rim, you can go play and you don't need anybody else around."

When Williams started his own family, he continued to bury himself in the game. He still has a hole in his heart from missing out on Kristin's childhood during the years he was beavering away as an assistant at Lafayette and Boston College and then as a head coach at American University, BC and Ohio State. In 1990 Williams and his wife, Diane, split up after 22 years of marriage, a painful reminder of his own broken home. Yet his life changed, he says, when Kristin and her husband, Geoff Scott, gave him his first grandson, David, in late 1999. "Once he became a grandfather, there was a certain peace he felt," says Kristin, a part-time schoolteacher who lives in Columbus, Ohio. "He just decided he wanted to do things right. My dad keeps saying, 'You've got the rest of your life to work on your career, but you're never going to get this time back with David.'"

These days Williams happily attends David's birthday parties, takes him to the zoo and even crawls with the towheaded two-year-old into his nylon-mesh playpen during trips to Columbus. Williams recently gave David a sweatshirt that says put me in coach, and he purchased a special kid-sized bed for his grandson's visits to Maryland. "It's almost like a do-over," Williams says. "When my daughter was two, I didn't realize how much fun that was because I'd be thinking, I hope I can get that job, or, We've gotta go see this kid play."

The boss's new approach to his own life applies to his team as well. Williams lets his players take half-court shots to end most practices ("When I played, it was, 'Practice is over, get dressed,'" says assistant Matt Kovarik, a former Terps guard), and he offered an emotional apology to the team after its ACC tournament semifinal loss to North Carolina State last month, taking full blame for abandoning an effective zone defense that the players wanted to stick with.

But the kinder, gentler Williams was nowhere to be found on Monday night, not when he called a timeout after Indiana had tied the game at 40-40 with less than 12 minutes remaining. "There was a lot of yelling," says junior forward Ryan Randle. "After he calmed down, he told us we had to find a way to win. We knew if we started pounding it inside, we'd be all right." Duly admonished, Baxter bulled his way to the basket for a layup on the next trip downcourt, a scene that was repeated frequently down the stretch as the Terps' burlier frontcourt of Baxter, Tahj Holden and Chris Wilcox dominated Indiana's Jeffries, Jeff Newton and Jarrad Odle.

These Terrapins have the distinction of being the first team to win a national title without a McDonald's High School All-American since that honorific was created in 1978. Williams has built his program on unheralded prospects like Baxter, a once-overweight forward who played in the shadow of an NBA draft pick (Korleone Young) on his high school team at Hargrave Military Academy. Likewise, before Wilcox morphed into a surefire NBA lottery pick, the 6'9" sophomore forward was a project from a backwater town (Whiteville, N.C.). "The longer you coach, the more you realize you don't have to have the best talent," Williams says. "You can beat teams that might be a little more talented than you are if you're willing to work harder. Plus it's more fun. You're not dealing with a bunch of guys who are upset that they're still in college when they're juniors."

Or, as Randle cracked after the Terps had dispatched Kansas (and its four McDonald's selects) 97-88 on Saturday, "Man, I guess we're gonna have to be Burger King All-Americans."

In that case the smallest of small fries is the perfect complement to Maryland's Whoppers. Dixon was a 6'1", 145-pound wraith upon graduating from Baltimore's Calvert Hall High--"My AAU coach, Anthony Lewis, called me World," says Dixon, "because my head stood out so much on my body"--but Williams decided to take a chance on him when he saw Dixon play at the Peach Jam, an AAU tournament in Augusta, the summer before his senior year. "It was like a thousand degrees down there," Williams recalls. "The game was a 20-point blowout, his team was losing, and with two minutes left he dove on the court for a loose ball. You see that and you say, Well, he's probably going to work pretty hard when he gets to college."

Coaching careers can be made on such tiny decisions. In his freshman year Dixon got better just by lining up against All-America Steve Francis every day in practice. He learned how to tighten up his footwork on offense and defense, increasing his efficiency. He studied tape until his eyes glazed over, learning his opponents' schemes. And he lifted weights like a Venice Beach tough guy, improving his bench press from 100 pounds to 230 and packing power into his twiggy legs. "When I first got to Maryland, I couldn't grab the rim," Dixon says. "Now I'm dunking on a consistent basis." More than that, he's a 165-pound first-team All-America with a physique that Williams compares to a middleweight boxer's.

In Dixon, Williams also discovered a kindred spirit, the lone Terrapin who isn't afraid to give Williams some of his own medicine--"The only one," Patsos says, "who will really give as good as he gets." During Maryland's opening-round defeat of Siena, Williams went apoplectic after Dixon missed an ill-advised three-pointer, whereupon Dixon turned and screamed, "Coach, shut the f--- up!"

Warning-label utterances are nothing new to Dixon, who, in the final minutes before every tournament game, would pop Jay-Z's The Blueprint into his CD player, listen to track 6 (U Don't Know) and conclude by repeating the last line three times: "I will not lose ever. I will not lose ever. I will not lose ever." In Saturday's semifinal Dixon put those words into action with his jump shot, matching his career high with 33 points to sink the Jayhawks. "Can you say a guy had a quiet 33?" Terps guard Drew Nicholas asked afterward. "Everything he got was in the context of the offense. It was amazing."

After Kansas had taken a 13-2 lead, Williams delivered a spittle-laced philippic. ("If we're gonna lose this game, we're gonna lose it fighting. We aren't gonna be punks!") Dixon answered by scoring 10 straight points, but his finest moment came later, after another on-court exchange with his coach. With just under two minutes to go, the Jayhawks had whittled an 83-63 Terrapins lead to 87-82. Memories of last year's Final Four collapse against Duke, in which Maryland had gagged on a 22-point first-half advantage, came flooding back to Williams, who later admitted that he'd begun to contemplate what he'd say in the postmortem press conference if the Terps choked again.

With Maryland sagging against the ropes, Dixon clanged a three-point attempt, and suddenly Kansas had the ball, but this time Williams had an entirely unexpected reaction. "Take the next one!" he encouraged his star from the sideline. Dixon nodded. Two years ago he sank a baseline runner at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C., to beat Illinois, a shot the coaching staff considers to be the moment Dixon became the Terps' leader. Sure enough, after a defensive stop, he hit the same baseline runner the next time down the court. Game over.

In Monday's title game, two of Maryland's most important plays wouldn't even make it into the box score, and both came courtesy of Mouton. Clinging to a 53-49 lead late in the second half, Terps guard Steve Blake, suffering through his worst performance of the year, missed a three-pointer, only to have Mouton go after the loose-ball rebound and, while falling over the baseline, throw a Hail Mary pass back to Blake at midcourt. "I just wanted someone on my team to have a chance to get it," said Mouton, who struck again a minute later, lunging wildly to tip Baxter's missed free throw to Dixon. In both cases the Terps scored immediately. "Sick plays. Just sick," Indiana's Fife would moan afterward. "But that's Mouton's game. They run nothing for him on offense, so he digs for everything."

Second chances. They were the story of the game, and so much more for Maryland and its hard-driving, long-suffering coach. To understand Williams's newfound equanimity, it's best not to gaze at his one-man sideline show. Instead, you have to peer under that calcified shell and hope to catch a fleeting glimpse as he sheds his $300 Italian loafers and climbs into his grandson's playpen. In much the same way that Williams seized a second chance with his family, he and his Terrapins redeemed themselves on Monday, grabbing hold of the championship denied them by last year's inglorious Final Four exit.

So thank you, Coach, and thank you, Maryland, for reminding us once again: Do-overs are allowed, in life and in basketball.

"Gary's teams reflect his intensity," says UConn's Calhoun. "That's what makes him a great coach."

"The longer you coach," says Williams, "the more you realize you don't have to have the best talent."

Second chances were the story of the game--and much more for the long-suffering Williams.

Maryland's Seniors Pass Test

By Joe Drape, New York Times
published April 3, 2002

Next fall, the University of Maryland will hang its first national championship banner in a brand-new basketball arena because of some old players. They call them seniors -- an increasingly rare breed in an age when high school athletes go from the prom to the pros and underclassmen speed through college as if it were a fast-food drive-through window, en route to the National Basketball Association.

Seniors possess better-developed bodies, more polished skills, keener court knowledge and, as demonstrated during Maryland's 64-52 victory over Indiana in the national title game, greater patience. ''Calm down,'' Juan Dixon told his Maryland teammates when Indiana first forced a tie, then briefly took the lead with a little less than 10 minutes to play. ''We're going to win. Make plays at the right times.''

Dixon, a senior, had already set an example. After scoring 11 points in the game's opening 10 minutes, he had been held scoreless by Dane Fife for the ensuing 20 minutes. Did Dixon, Maryland's leading scorer, panic because he was far below the 27.4-point tournament scoring average he brought to the title game?

Not at all. Dixon weaved and wiggled without the ball until he freed himself for a 3-pointer that gave Maryland the lead again. His shooting line is a testament to letting the game come to you: he took only nine shots, made six of them and scored 18 points.

Center Lonny Baxter, another four-year hand, committed himself to Coach Gary Williams's game plan to pound the ball inside on the smaller Hoosiers. The 6-foot-8, 260-pound Baxter was coming off a poor game against Kansas in the semifinals, in which he played just 14 minutes because of foul trouble. Baxter banished that memory and staked out his ground in the middle to score 15 points and pull down 14 rebounds on Monday.

Baxter's zeal for punishing the Hoosiers inside was contagious, as demonstrated by Maryland's 42-32 rebounding advantage and the Terrapins' six blocked shots. This dominance down low negated Indiana's long-range shooting.

Through five tournament games, the Hoosiers shot 55 percent from the field and 52 percent from the 3-point line. Against Maryland, they made just 34.5 percent from the field, 43.5 from beyond the arc and missed 11 of their final 14 shots.

''I thought their inside defense was great,'' said Indiana guard Tom Coverdale, who was just 3 of 11 from the field. ''They didn't have to double-team as much. They could just lock down on our shooters. We haven't really faced a defense that could do the things they did.''

The Hoosiers (25-12) had also not faced a team with as much experience; perhaps Indiana's Jared Jeffries should watch the tape of the game before deciding whether to enter the N.B.A. draft by the May 12 deadline. Jeffries, a 6-10 sophomore forward, is a gifted offensive player and is coveted by pro scouts for his ability to score inside and out.

But he hardly looked ready for the N.B.A. Jeffries scored 8 points, shot 4 for 11 and was bounced around by Baxter, who has the makings to be a solid professional but is a long way from Tracy McGrady, Kevin Garnett or other N.B.A. stars.

''He's so physical,'' Indiana Coach Mike Davis said of Baxter. ''He was just kind of bulling our guys out of the way. He got the ball point-blank, and once he gets it point-blank there's nothing you can do.''

The Hoosiers -- including Davis, who says he, too, wants to go to the N.B.A. -- may be best served by more than watching this championship game on tape. They should follow Maryland's example for overcoming heartbreak.

Until Monday night, Maryland basketball was considered an underachieving program and Williams a coach too often humbled by the tournament. Last season, Williams's 12th at Maryland, the Terps made their first Final Four despite losing a regular-season game to Duke after leading by 10 points with a minute to play. In the national semifinals last season, Maryland lost to Duke again, after leading by 22 points.

Those defeats were probably as important as the 109 victories -- the most for a Maryland senior class -- that Dixon, Baxter and Byron Mouton took into Monday's game. ''It took me five years to understand what it takes to win,'' said Mouton, who transferred to Maryland from Tulane.

None of that was lost on Williams, who watched the final seconds tick down on his and his alma mater's first national title. It took him 24 seasons as a head coach to experience a championship. He watched Dixon and Baxter hug and collapse in a heap as the buzzer sounded, and Mouton bound up and down. He and his team had been patient. Now they were grateful.

''You always want that to happen,'' Williams said. ''I was thinking: 'Here is a group of seniors that have had a tremendous number of wins over the four-year period. They get to play for the national championship and now win the national championship in the last game of their college career. How many guys get to do that?' ''

Unfortunately, not enough.