Atlanta sunlight slipped through the crack in the hotel curtains like an uninvited reporter, stubbornly flashing right in Xu Ling's face.
"Hiss—"
Frowning, he pulled his pillow over his head.
Suddenly, the door burst open with a bang. Roderick Craig—the man with a bottomless reserve of energy—barged into the room waving that morning's edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Splashed across the front page was a massive freeze-frame shot of Xu Ling drilling a step-back three over Greg Oden, under the bold headline: "China's Sniper."
"Yo, bro, do you have any idea? Last night you made me the hottest roommate in America!" Craig bounced over to the edge of the bed like a lottery winner clutching a jackpot ticket. "When I went out for coffee this morning, the barista didn't even ask for my name. She just yelled, 'Hey, that's Eli's teammate!'"
Xu Ling rolled over lazily. "Shouldn't you be proud? That's free fame I handed you."
"Proud my ass!" Craig waved the newspaper with theatrical flair. "Now the whole team thinks I'm supposed to sort through your fan mail, pick out your gifts, and some people are even asking me to find out if you've got a girlfriend!"
"Then tell them I do," Xu Ling mumbled.
Craig blinked. "The question is—do you really?"
Exasperated by his straightforward roommate, Xu Ling yanked the pillow off his head. "Which is more important: that, or playing Florida tomorrow?"
Craig plopped down onto the edge of the mattress. "Equally important! But seriously, Eli, some of your shots last night were out of this world. And what was the deal with Oden? Was he being careless, or do you have some kind of secret? You picked his pocket so many times."
"Just experience," Xu Ling said mildly. "Back when I played back home, there was a center with the exact same habits. I stole the ball from him a dozen times in a single game. After he graduated, he took his talents to a corporate team in the countryside."
Craig burst into helpless laughter. "Haha! God bless Greg Oden then!"
Unlike earlier rounds where teams had five or six days of rest between games, reaching the Final Four meant the two surviving squads had only a single day off before the finale.
Tomorrow, Texas Tech would return to the Georgia Dome to face the University of Florida in the national championship game.
That left the Red Raiders with just one practice session in Atlanta.
With only a day, there wasn't much they could overhaul anyway.
Besides, when you reached the national championship, neither team had any secrets left.
TTU's glaring vulnerabilities remained their interior size and bench depth.
"Boys, look around you," the old coach's voice sounded unusually gentle. "Six months ago, people said making the Sweet Sixteen would be a miracle for us."
His gaze swept across every player. "Yet here we stand, and there's a reason for that."
Pinned to the tactical board was Florida's scouting report—the formidable no-fly zone manned by Al Horford and Joakim Noah, Corey Brewer's all-around perimeter defense, and Taurean Green's deadly marksmanship from deep.
"I must also tell you that since 1975, virtually every defending champion that returned its entire starting lineup went on to repeat as champions."
"Virtually?"
Xu Ling picked up on the hidden qualifier immediately. "Meaning not all of them did."
"That's right." A faint smirk touched the corner of Knight's mouth. "In 1985, Georgetown lost to Villanova."
"An upset from twenty-two years ago..." Jon Plefka muttered.
"That's the point," Xu Ling said, standing up. "It proves miracles never go away. Nobody believed we could beat North Carolina, and nobody thought we could get past Ohio State. We've made it all the way here, with only one last step to go. Is anyone still doubting that we can win it all?"
"Exactly. That's the mindset you need," Knight agreed with a nod and a rare smile. "Remember what Eli said. In the NCAA, miracles never die."
Practice resumed as scheduled.
The squeak of rubber against hardwood, the crisp swish of nets, and bursts of lighthearted chatter filled the gym. The atmosphere was surprisingly relaxed and calm, as though tomorrow were just another regular-season matchup rather than a clash for the national title.
"Hey, J.J., let's play a game," Xu Ling challenged, palming a basketball in one hand as he called out to team captain Jarrius Jackson. "Three-point contest from the spot. Ten shots each. Loser buys dinner."
Jackson grinned broadly. "You're on, rookie. Get your wallet ready."
The two lined up in opposite corners and began their shootout. The steady *swish-swish* of cords snapping echoed through the gym, drawing amused glances from the rest of the roster.
"Wait, does that one count?" sophomore guard Alan Voskuil piped up, pointing at Jackson's final attempt. "Wasn't his foot on the line?"
Jackson glared at him. "Bullshit! That was clean as a whistle!"
"Let me review the tape," Voskuil deadpanned, framing his hands like a video monitor. "Yep, definitely stepped out. Nine to ten. Eli takes it. Captain buys dinner."
Jackson hurled the basketball at him in mock fury, which Voskuil dodged with a laugh.
Over on the sideline, Martin Zeno fished a whistle out of nowhere, stuck it in his mouth with great ceremony, and blew a sharp trill. He pointed dramatically at Xu Ling. "Traveling! That basket doesn't count!"
Xu Ling put on a face of utter confusion. "Traveling on a spot-up jumper?!"
Plefka and Craig were practically doubled over laughing, flopping straight onto the hardwood and doing their best broadcast imitations: "Ladies and gentlemen, live from the TTU team shootout! It appears Eli Xu is the victim of crooked officiating! Lead referee Martin Zeno has clearly taken a bribe from Jarrius Jackson!"
Near the tactical board at the far end of the gym, Bob Knight stood quietly beside his coaching staff.
His son, Pat Knight, murmured, "Aren't these guys a little too loose?"
Knight shook his head, his eyes resting on the playful young men.
"Let them be," Knight said softly. "At a moment like this, their frame of mind matters more than anything."
His gaze settled on Xu Ling—the Chinese freshman had just drilled a deep shot from well behind the arc, turning around to shrug at his faux-protesting teammates, a cunning grin and unshakeable confidence radiating from his face.
Knight looked away and quietly walked off.
The night passed without incident.
April 2, 2007.
Game day for the 2006–07 NCAA National Championship.
On one side was the defending champion, stacked with talent and showing virtually no weaknesses; on the other was a storybook Cinderella team.
Both squads boasted legions of devoted supporters.
Tip-off was set for 4:00 PM.
It was now three o'clock.
The team bus would soon depart for the Georgia Dome, yet Texas Tech's head coach, Bob Knight, sat alone in his hotel room, staring blankly at a yellowed slip of paper.
His thoughts drifted back to the past—to the golden age of college basketball, and to the absolute pinnacle of his coaching career.
In 1983, a year before the 1984 Olympics, Knight was chosen as head coach of the United States Men's National Basketball Team, tasked with defending American honor on home soil. It was an extraordinary era, with college basketball overflowing with legendary talent: Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, Charles Barkley, Wayman Tisdale, Sam Perkins, Alvin Robertson... Any professional coach blessed with such an embarrassment of riches would have felt absolute certainty about capturing the gold medal. To make matters even simpler, the Soviet Union announced a boycott of the Los Angeles Games in retaliation for America's 1980 boycott of Moscow. By every conventional metric, the path to glory had been cleared.
Yet Knight could not afford to fail. Had he fallen short, he would have suffered the same fate as Henry Iba in 1972—forever trapped in disgrace. It would have destroyed him.
To mold that makeshift roster into a disciplined machine akin to his Indiana teams, Knight went so far as to cut Charles "Stranger to Discipline" Barkley. He screamed at every player on the roster and pushed Jordan relentlessly with taunts of *Is that the best you've got?* Jordan later swore it was the last time in his basketball life he would ever allow anyone to treat him that way. That star-studded American squad tore through the tournament, obliterating every opponent in their path to reach the final without the slightest suspense.
On the day of the gold medal game, however, omens of trouble appeared. Jordan, the team's undisputed leader, had brought the wrong jersey, while several other players had forgotten their warmups entirely. Knight grew anxious and agitated, sensing that these young men weren't taking the final seriously at all. They just wanted to get it over with and go home.
An unspeakable nightmare seemed to creep closer.
The 1972 squad hadn't believed they could lose either.
Before failure strikes, its warning signs always arrive in droves.
Knight intended to unleash hell before tip-off, shocking the boys back into focus. Yet when he stormed into the locker room, ready to erupt, he discovered a small note taped to the blackboard where the opposing starters were usually written. On it was scrawled:
*Coach, after all this shit, we're not going to lose tonight.*
He recognized Michael Jordan's handwriting immediately. Knight peeled the note off the board, slipped it into his pocket, and uttered not another word.
That evening, the Americans' opponents in the final barely held on for five minutes. The final score was 101 to 68.
When the final horn sounded, Knight reached his golden moment—the highest mountain he would ever summit in his life.
From that point on, Robert Montgomery Knight had conquered every supreme honor non-professional basketball had to offer. His Indiana Hoosiers had gone 63–1 between 1974 and 1976, and the 1976 team remained the last undefeated national champion in college basketball history. That run propelled Knight's Indiana program past UCLA as the premier power of the era. Five years later, the Hoosiers cut down the nets again, cementing Knight's status as the greatest active coach in college basketball.
Olympic gold, Pan American gold, and two NCAA national championships—at forty-three years old, Knight stood at the apex of amateur basketball. He had never imagined that glory could be so fleeting. Over the next twenty-two years, he would capture one more NCAA championship, but everything else began to change around him.
Knight placed the historic note into a small keepsake box and drew a long breath.
*Why am I still coaching?*
He couldn't help thinking of his great mentor, Red Auerbach, who chose to step down from the sidelines at age forty-nine to focus solely on front-office work.
Auerbach had known his accomplishments could never be duplicated.
Knight, however, had lacked that wisdom and resolve. He had never known when to walk away.
Yet just last year, he had finally begun to wonder if there was any point in pushing forward.
Knight had arrived at Texas Tech with grand ambitions. He wanted to win a championship here, to prove to the basketball world that he could still transform a middle-of-the-pack program into an elite powerhouse. But in an era where a Michael Jordan would never dream of staying in college for three years, Knight's recruiting efforts rarely gained traction.
His 2005 recruiting class had looked like a triumph on paper. Knight had landed almost every prospect on his wishlist, confident he could build around them to keep the program competitive once his incoming seniors graduated.
Instead, that season turned into an unmitigated disaster.
Knight clashed with the freshmen, the freshmen clashed with the veterans, team chemistry evaporated, and the coaching staff fractured. It ended in a dismal campaign—only the second time in the Knight era that TTU failed to make March Madness.
The harsher blow came after the season ended, when a massive wave of freshmen chose to transfer.
In those days, college basketball looked nothing like the era that would follow a decade later—players had no NIL endorsements and couldn't transfer freely whenever they pleased. Back then, student-athletes held virtually no power. Putting money aside, even if you fell for a recruiter's pitch only to discover the program was completely different from what you'd imagined, you usually swallowed your pride and stayed, because transferring meant sitting out an entire year.
Under those rules, a head coach's authority was as absolute as a king's. Yet the very freshmen Knight had pinned his hopes on bolted from Lubbock at the end of the year like inmates staging a prison break. Only two remained. It dealt Knight a devastating blow, battering his reputation, inviting fierce criticism from the media, and wrecking the team's long-term roster construction.
Six months ago, Knight had been drowning in despair, convinced that his tenure at Texas Tech was turning into a pathetic punchline.
Every time he stepped into the practice gym, it felt like an indictment of his failure. Knight had contemplated stepping down more than once, drafting several versions of a resignation letter.
And then, that Chinese kid showed up like a savior.
Miraculously, TTU began to win. First came the victory over Kansas for the Big 12 title, followed by a relentless march through March Madness—Duke, North Carolina, Ohio State, powerhouses falling one by one at their feet.
Knight stood before the hotel window. In the distance, the Georgia Dome gleamed beneath the afternoon sun. After twenty long years, he was back on the national championship stage.
A team written off by everyone, a team that should have fallen apart at the start of the season, was now just one victory away from making history.
"Coach, are you daydreaming?"
Snapping out of his reverie, Knight turned to see Xu Ling leaning against the doorframe, a teasing grin playing on his lips.
"The whole team is on the bus taking bets on whether you've finally decided to retire."
"Is that so?" Knight grunted.
"I told them the legendary Coach Bob Knight must be putting the finishing touches on some earth-shattering game plan," Xu Ling said. "Craig insisted you probably just couldn't find a clean suit."
"Ten years ago, players wouldn't dare talk to their coach that way."
"Well, you're running late, Coach," Xu Ling winked. "Everyone's waiting on you."
Knight silently double-checked his belongings, zipped his travel bag, and brushed past Xu Ling toward the hallway.
"Let's go, genius. Championships don't win themselves."
Chapter 42