Bryce Drew’s buzzer-beater and Valparaiso’s NCAA tournament upset, 25 years on

DENVER — Time is gray hair. It’s grown-up kids. It’s dreams, stumbles, long days and fast years.

Twenty-five years of basketball time meandered through the hallways inside Ball Arena on Thursday. A hoops family, an all-time moment, roads less traveled and two brothers still in the game.

And me. I haven’t had an occasion to see Bryce Drew or Scott Drew, haven’t spoken to them, haven’t asked a question of them since 1998. But on March 13, 1998, Bryce Drew authored one of the NCAA tournament moments that has since made most every list of Cinderellas, upsets, remember-whens and “OMG where were you?” moments of the tournament.

“We definitely didn’t know [it would be remembered]. We had a group of six seniors, it was our third consecutive NCAA tournament, and we had lost the previous two years,” Bryce Drew, now Grand Canyon University coach, said Thursday. “When we won that game, we were just so happy, because that was our big goal going into that season, was win a game in the tournament. … We had finally accomplished that after three years, just so excited about that.”

Fire up the search engines for the particulars: Inside the Myriad Convention Center in Oklahoma City, Valparaiso — with Bryce Drew as its star guard, Scott Drew as an assistant coach and their father, Homer Drew, as the longtime head coach — was a 12-point underdog to Ole Miss.

The feisty upstarts then did what so many do in this annual event — they sent casual fans searching for maps to find a northwest Indiana town and pushed one of the big-conference outfits to the edge. Trailing 69-67, Bryce Drew had missed a 3-point attempt with roughly five seconds left in the game.

Mississippi’s Ansu Sesay was fouled on the rebound. Sesay missed his first free throw, and Homer Drew then called a timeout to draw up what he later gleefully revealed to the world was a play he called “Pacer.”

Sesay then missed the second free throw, and the battle for the loose ball on the rebound went off Mississippi’s Keith Carter with 2.5 seconds left. The rest? Well, the rest has been played over and over again.

I’ve seen it probably 30 times over the years, most every time glass slippers and March are in the same sentence, or when some proof is needed about any given day. Jamie Sykes threw the in-bounds pass just past midcourt, and a leaping Bill Jenkins tapped the ball to Bryce Drew, who then made the heave for the win. Pacer was, and still is, history.