College basketball drama can be found everywhere

	Williams coach Dave Paulsen cuts down the nets after his team upset Amherst to win the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Courtesy of Williams College

AMHERST, Ma. -- Come February, basketball thrives in undiscovered corners, far from outsized arenas, shoe contracts and bracketology. Games are played for the right to play more games. Buzzers are beaten. Courts are stormed. Nets are snipped with scissors and worn from the neck. This I am reminded because on Sunday morning I set out from home, playing a hunch in search of good basketball, Hockey Player Son grudgingly in tow. Our destination would be Amherst College, a small, elite liberal arts college in central Masschusetts, home of the No. 3-ranked Division III men's team in the country, with a 26-1 record. At noon on this day Amherst would play Williams, its mirror image in prestige and its longtime rival, a young team with a 15-11 record that Amherst had beaten twice in the regular season by a comfortable average of 20 points. At stake was the championship of the New England Small College Athletic Conference and an automatic berth in the NCAA Division III Tournament that begins this weekend. (Mini-March Madness?).

Why make this trip? It was an act of faith, really; a belief in the tradition of late-season and post-season basketball that promises double the return on every minute invested. Football is America's spouse; basketball is its affair.

O.K. There were other reasons to pick this game, as well:

1) I am a Williams alumnus and my daughter is a student there; hence, I have a distant interest.

2) I am engaged in an ongoing attempt to convince Hockey Player Son that basketball, a game I played and coached in a previous life, is more than ``frickin' timeouts.''

But in the end, it was just the faith. And faith was rewarded with a gift. Sometimes a game beckons. Here Amherst had not only beaten Williams twice, but just two of its 26 victories had been by less than 10 points. ``To be honest, you'd really have to say that they're probably deeper and more talented than we are,'' Williams coach Dave Paulsen, who took the Ephmen (named for college founder Col. Ephraim Williams) to the national title in 2003, told me the day after the game.

However, Amherst had already clinched a berth in the nationals and had lost to Trinity College on Feb. 10. Meanwhile, Williams had been 8-9 at one point in the season. but had won seven of its last nine and had beaten Trinity to reach the NESCAC final. Most importantly, Williams and Amherst are intense rivals, despite -- or perhaps because of -- the fact they compete for the same students and athletes. Some games smell close; this was one of those games.

Or maybe not. When I walked into the gym with Hockey Player Son two minutes past tipoff, Amherst led, 7-0. In the ensuing three minutes, that lead would grow to a preposterous 15-0 and nearly seven minutes would elapse before Williams sophomore Kevin Snyder dropped a three-pointer from the left side, the Ephs' first basket, prompting a raucous, sarcastic -- and hilarious -- cheer from the Amherst student section.