After beating no. 1, UMBC falls to a no. 9

Having become the first No. 16 seed ever to defeat a No. 1 when they beat top overall seed Virginia on Friday, the Retrievers, which had won the America East Conference title, succumbed to a squad that had been no slouch itself. Kansas State had finished fourth in college basketball’s best conference, the Big 12. The Wildcats were athletic and big, with a defense UMBC’s Daniel Akin described as “more intense than Virginia’s.”

The Wildcats were also very aware of their place in this tale.

“We know that everyone is kind of looking for that Cinderella story,” Wildcats guard Barry Brown Jr. acknowledged a day before scoring a game-high 18 points to close the book on that story.

While Kansas State’s fierce defense and superior athleticism played a major role in UMBC’s defeat, several Retrievers players pointed to good looks but bad luck. A team that shot 38.2 percent from long range over the course of the season went 27.3 percent from beyond the arc Sunday night.

“I felt that we got open shots,” said Jairus Lyles, who was the hero of the Virginia game with 28 points but led the team with only 12 on Sunday. “We just didn’t make them today.”

The atmosphere was not to Kansas State’s advantage. Charlotte’s Spectrum Center had been packed with fans of North Carolina, which lost to Texas A&M in the early game. As the arena emptied out, it became clear that most who remained were pulling for the underdog, including loyal fans in black and gold who chanted “UM!” “BC!” across the arena at each other.

The first half was ugly, and the score of 25-20 in Kansas State’s favor reflected that. Lyles had as many turnovers as he had points (4).

Both teams had prolonged dry spells in the second half. At one point, UMBC went more than five minutes without a field goal, and at another, Kansas State went more than four. Amid all this, both teams went nearly four minutes without any points at all. Kansas State stubbornly maintained a minuscule lead.

The drought was broken when Lyles hit a 3-pointer — his first of the night — to decrease Kansas State’s lead to 1 point with six minutes left.

But when the Wildcats built a 5-point lead with a little more than four minutes left, it felt like a chasm. And when Xavier Sneed slammed home his teammate’s miss to create a 6-point lead with less than three minutes remaining, it felt definitive.

The Retrievers’ postgame locker room, while far from jubilant, was not quite as downcast as other locker rooms on the losing end of a game in a single-elimination tournament tend to be. The players seemed to understand they would be remembered and honored for Friday’s game and had acquitted themselves well Sunday.

“When you’re in a smaller conference like we are, you see a lot of talk about, ‘These small conferences shouldn’t even be in the tournament,’ ‘We don’t need 16-seeds,'” junior Joe Sherburne said. “So obviously I think we changed some people’s minds.”

Akin added, “No one can take away the feeling of beating the No. 1 team in the country.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.