South Carolina’s win over second-seeded Duke was not only a surprise to fans. In the postgame revelry, Coach Frank Martin had to ask an assistant whom his team would face next.
“Who we got?” Martin said.
The answer was that the seventh-seeded Gamecocks would face Baylor in New York, at Madison Square Garden. A tide of emotions swept over the coach. Martin knows the deep roots that the South Carolina program has here, the pipeline that the former coach Frank McGuire once established out of the boroughs, busing a city’s flair to the southern countryside.
First, Bobby Cremins, then Kevin Joyce, Mike Dunleavy and Brian Winters.