[KcMizzou]

Border War actually lived up to the hype, and more

This game actually lives up to all the hype

By SAM MELLINGER

The Kansas City Star

C There is no good way to do this justice. However loud you think it can be in an arena with 15,061 fans and two basketball teams that don’t particularly like each other, well, it can be just a little louder than that.

Allen Fieldhouse may get this loud in three weeks when Kansas and Missouri play again. That old barn may get this crazy. But it won’t be louder. Won’t be crazier.

Can’t be.

No. 4 Missouri beat No. 8 Kansas 74-71 in a head-throbbing, sometimes angry, often joyous, down-to-the-last-second and ultimately insane Mizzou Arena on Saturday that pulled off perhaps the rarest feat in sports:

It lived up to a hyperbolic wave of hype of that included some fans swearing off lifelong friendships (at least for a night), others wondering how much more of this they can take, and tickets to a regular-season college basketball game that people wouldn’t sell for $400.

There is almost no way for these things to be as good as we expect. This one was better.

“So much has been made about the hatred,” KU coach Bill Self says. “This is hard for me to say to Mizzou people, but I thought tonight, that was as good and classy an atmosphere as there is.”

You could remember this as The Marcus Denmon Game. He scored 29 points and hit the two biggest shots, including the go-ahead three-pointer with 56 seconds left as MU finished with an 11-0 run.

Or maybe you’d call this The Michael Dixon Game. He made the biggest play of the game, taking a charge against Tyshawn Taylor — a call that Kansas fans are cussing at this very moment — and then hit both free throws to make the final score.

Fitting that it was two Kansas City kids making the biggest plays in our city’s biggest rivalry.

“Where we come from,” Dixon says, “Kansas fans everywhere, Missouri fans everywhere, you can’t just sit here and say it’s an ordinary game because it’s not.”

But, really, this should go down as The Vomit Game. Kim English deepened his cult following by throwing up at halftime and then scoring MU’s first five points of the second half.

It was English, too, who his teammates remember reassuring them — We’re gonna win this game! — in the huddle when Mizzou trailed by eight with less than three minutes left.

So here’s hoping that’s the one that sticks: The Vomit Game.

“I vomited a lot,” he says. “I don’t know who catered the pregame meal … I had to do it during the game. But that would’ve been embarrassing.”

If this is indeed the end of the Border War — Self stopped short of saying anything definitive beyond “the immediate future” — it is going out the way one of the country’s great college basketball rivalries should.

The first pregame fireworks anyone around here can remember left smoke hanging over the entire first half and even into the second. People who’ve watched Missouri basketball for decades can’t remember a game in Columbia ever being louder, and afterward, some of the players said the crowd made them better.

Even in a loss, Thomas Robinson scored 25 points with 13 rebounds on 11-of-16 shooting, the kind of thing talking heads like to point to when justifying who should be the national player of the year.

Tyshawn Taylor was mostly terrific, too, 21 points and defense that kept Mizzou point guard Phil Pressey to two points. Afterward, Self sat in a steaming hot room packed with reporters and called Taylor “damn good,” even after missing two late free throws that could’ve changed the finish.

Self called this “about as good as we can play,” save a three-minute stretch of each half, so Missouri took KU’s best shot and still came away with a second win over a top 10 team this season.

This is getting real, the Border War’s supposed last year coming with these teams both controlling the league race — they’re now tied with Baylor for first at 8-2 — and holding legitimate Final Four aspirations.

These teams play again on Feb. 25 in what is sure to be a rocking Allen Fieldhouse with everyone understanding that the rest of the league is entirely uncomfortable with the idea of Mizzou winning the last Big 12 title it will ever play for.

The Jayhawks, even today, are the ones who can stop it from happening. One of the country’s greatest rivalries is playing out one more time with something that sure feels bigger than just a game at stake and that’s the best part of this.

More is on the way, and it’s coming fast.

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/04...ved-up-to.html