After all the years of agony, Purdue on the verge of something different

Besting Tennessee today would put it in the Final Four.

DETROIT — With waves of polished excellence on the floor and gales of unearthly noise from the crowd, Purdue returned Friday night to a dreamland doorstep it had reached only thrice before across 44 good yet aching seasons of craving the Final Four. It accessed the verge of that damned-elusive Final Four when it strafed Gonzaga, 80-68, in a Midwest Region semifinal with a towering star, a bustling guard and a supporting cast good enough that it sometimes stars.

Now these latest Boilermakers (32-4) take their fans to that Elite Eight stage that has taunted the program in 1994, 2000 and 2019, years it found the verge but lost to Duke, Wisconsin and Virginia. If it can defeat Tennessee today here downtown, Purdue will grace a Final Four for the first time since 1980, which would mean it would get to stop at last hearing the words that compose “1980.”

“We’ve had disappointment, and I think anytime you have that you appreciate things a little bit more and your attention to detail is a little better,” said 19th-season coach Matt Painter, whose litany of winces includes an overtime loss in a 2019 South Region final against Virginia, which tied the game on one of the nuttiest plays James Naismith’s invention of a sport ever cooked up.

Now there’s a chance of a soaring appreciation come today all because there was a down-to-earth attention to detail Friday night.

That manifested in the stat that shone most from the box, the 15 assists for sophomore guard Braden Smith, who tends to reside with everyone else in the shadow of 7-foot-4 Zach Edey.

“Braden is the head of the snake, (and) I tell him all the time, we go as he goes,” said Lance Jones, the import from Southern Illinois whose 12 points and three assists mattered as well.

“I’ve never played with anyone who sets me up like that,” said Edey, soon adding, “I don’t think people give him enough credit.”

“A big-time stat,” Painter said of the 15, “especially in a Sweet 16 game.”

The Sweet 16 itself had felled Purdue on eight occasions in the 44 years of want, but it didn’t do so here largely because Edey, the senior from Toronto, has honed his skills yet further in the year since the stultifying loss as a No. 1 seed to No. 16 Fairleigh Dickinson.

That, too, showed in the box, in Edey’s 27 points, the pretty little hooks that decorated his 10-for-15 shooting, his 14 rebounds, his alteration of Gonzaga’s shots once Bulldogs ventured in there and the five fouls that glowed off the box for each of Graham Ike and Anton Watson, Gonzaga big men (but not that big) who had helped the team thrive of late as a No. 5 seed reaching the program’s remarkable ninth straight Sweet 16.

Those foul-outs thrilled the traveling Boilermakers crowd and reiterated the nature of the hard, hard puzzle of solving Edey.

“His stamina is something for someone of his size,” Painter said, a further boost coming from the long timeouts of March Madness. Painter wound up saying, “It’s hard with the kind of attention that he gets to kind of understand his surroundings sometimes,” and praising Edey “just keeping his composure with all the physicality.”