Gohlke puts Oakland on the map as Kentucky’s March woes continue

PITTSBURGH — Where to begin? With the mother of the newest star of college basketball, weeping in the stands, now that her son whom so few had heard of two hours before was now in the conscious of a nation’s fans, marveling at his fearless shooting?

With the winning coach of Oakland, a lifer on his job, trying to put into words how he had to wait 40 years for the basketball night of his life?

With the stunned victims from Kentucky, a blueblood now facing a stigma of ugly NCAA tournament exits and broken promises?

They were all part of a remarkable landscape Thursday night when Oakland brought down Kentucky 80-76. When a Division II transfer named Jack Gohlke came off the bench to slay a dragon, with 32 points and a shooting display that would make Caitlin Clark proud. Ten three-pointers. Ten. From hither and yon, usually with lots of Wildcat hands in his face. And when Kentucky exited the stage early again, meaning that in the past four years, the Wildcats have won one tournament game. Two fewer than Saint Peter’s.

How to sum up all that? A graduate student Kentucky forward might have done it best. “It’s March, you know?” Tre Mitchell said. “It’s March.”

You knew it was March Thursday night when Gohlke — who this time last year was finishing his career at Hillsdale College — came off the bench and began burying shots from everywhere. Well, everywhere outside the three-point arc since traditional two-pointers are not on Jack Gohlke’s radar screen. The mad bomber from Oakland had 12 three-point attempts in his first 12 minutes on the floor. He made 10 of the 20 he took for the game. Those 20 Thursday night are 12 more than the number of two-point shots he has put up the entire season — 355 total attempts, 347 from the three-point line. His barrage was what pushed the proverbial No. 14-seeded David from Oakland, with not one NCAA Tournament victory in its history except for a play-in game, over the proverbial No. 3-seeded Goliath from Kentucky, who has won 132 of them.

“I don’t like the David and Goliath thing,” Gohlke would say in a hallway afterward. “Obviously Kentucky is a tremendous team and we came in as an underdog, but we believe in ourselves, and obviously now the country believes in us.”

You knew it was March when Greg Kampe, in his 40th season at Oakland and the longest-tenured coach in Division I, could look at such a wonderful moment and know part of it came from the zone defense he had conjured…