THE DAY AFTER

Chiozza savors life as March Madness hero

SO … WHAT’S it like when the fantasy of anyone who ever has picked up a basketball becomes real life instead — and, better, becomes your real life? What’s it like to transfer a thousand days in your driveway — dribbling down the clock, doing the play-by-play, counting the clock down, 4 …3 … 2 … 1— into your own hands?

“In the driveway,” Florida’s Chris Chiozza said, “I think you miss more than you make.”

This was just past 3 o’clock on Saturday afternoon, meaning it was just more than 14 hours since Chiozza had become a permanent part of the lore of the NCAA Tournament.

Fourteen hours earlier, with exactly 4.0 seconds left in the East Region semifinals, trailing Wisconsin by two, Chiozza had taken an inbounds pass from Canyon Barry, and he had clicked his internal stopwatch. Four seconds, with his speed, meant he could take at least four dribbles. Maybe five.

Start there: How many times in a basketball season — college, pro, doesn’t matter the level — do you see a player with zero understanding of just how much time four seconds really is? They wind up taking a half-court heave, or rifling an off-balance prayer from 35 feet, and only later realize they had more time to play with? Not Chiozza. “We scrimmage that every day,” the Gators’ junior point guard said. “You’re up a point, or down a point, you take the ball out of bounds, four or five seconds to go.”

Four dribbles into his journey, Chiozza peeked at the clock, saw there were still 1.6 seconds left in the game, realized he could take a fifth dribble to give himself something resembling balance and lift-off. Left foot first, then right, and then he lurched over the 3-point line and let it fly.

In one corner, Devin Robinson instinctively had cut to the basket, and for a splitsecond thought Chiozza might be lofting a lob pass in his direction. And then he realized something else.

“Holy snap!” he thought. “This might go in!”

On the bench, Justin Leon watched and sent a mental memorandum to a higher authority.

“Please, God,” the senior forward said, “don’t let my career be over yet.”

Chiozza? He wasn’t sure how to feel, truth be told.

“It felt good coming out of my hand,” he said. “I knew it had a chance.”

Then: “It looked like was going in …”

And then it went in. Robinson was the first to greet him, squeezing him in a hug, keeping him stationary until the rest of the Gators could speed over and form a scrum. Devastated Wisconsin players immediately shot glances to the Garden scoreboard, hoping against hope to see testimony that Chiozza had either gotten the shot off late or, at the least, shot the ball inside the arc.

Nope. And nope. The ball left his hand with 0.6 seconds left. His left foot clearly was behind the stripe. It was right. It was real. It was ridiculous. “Disbelief,” Chiozza said. The next 14 hours were surreal, same as the next 14 years will be, and the next 40. When he got back to his locker, he discovered close to 300 text messages on his iPhone. “I heard from everybody I’ve ever met,” he said, laughing. How do you come down from that? You don’t. You go back to the hotel, you take a hot shower, you watch the replay of the shot a couple dozen times, you try to get some sleep, you fail, you click on the television, you settle on the movie “Neighbors,” you ponder what this all means in the big picture. “I think in 20 years, it’ll be exciting for my kids to see their dad make that shot,” he said. But it is more than that, of course. The day barely had dawned when former Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel posted a picture of his son trying to replicate Chiozza’s gamewinner. You had better believe he wasn’t the only one doing that in playgrounds and gymnasiums all across America on Saturday. Chiozza was asked which would be the harder shot in a game of H-O-R-S-E: his clinching floater, or the even-more-impossible-tobelieve game-tying 3 that Wisconsin’s Zak Showalter hit at the end of regulation, after he nearly tripped and then line-drived a 21-footer off his wrong foot. Chiozza thought about that a second, and smiled. “I think mine was a little harder,” he said.