One and ... done

The kid's gonna look great, holding that big trophy aloft. A basketball net will hang around his mighty neck like delicate lace. His coach will beam and recite his usual smarmy litany about the vanquished foe and what a brave fight they made.

Then he'll point to the kid and say how much he's gonna miss him, how much he bought into the Duke ethos in his brief visit to campus.

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. A week from tonight, Zion Williamson will close out his bus stop in Durham with a national title, on account of officials have reviewed the tape of the regional final and determined the scorekeeper mistakenly added 35 seconds to the game clock. Which means Kenny Goins' go-ahead 3-pointer for Michigan State should not have counted, and Duke actually won 66-65.

OK, OK. So it's April 1, and that's my little April Fool's joke.

("Extremely little," you're saying.)

Anyway, we have our Final Four now, and Zion Williamson and his coach, Mike Krzyzewski of One-and-Done U., are not in it. Kentucky, the original One-and-Done U., is not in it, either. Neither is North Carolina.

Instead, we have a Final Four that, after a first weekend with a distinctly chalky aftertaste, has wreaked joyous dismemberment on America's brackets. Only one 1-seed (Virginia) will be in Minneapolis this weekend, and it's the 1-seed the fewest people expected to be there. Half the Final Four (Texas Tech and Auburn) has never been there before, and Virginia hasn't been there in 35 years. Only Michigan State knows its way around these precincts.

Here's what they all have in common, however: They all have players who know their way around the college basketball precinct.

Which is to say Zion Williamson and the bus stop brigade are not well represented. This is especially the case in the backcourt, where everything begins and where experience, savvy and the sort of composure needed to survive all the Madness count the most.

And so no surprise that the guy most responsible for getting Michigan State to its latest Final Four is a senior guard, Cassius Winston.

And no surprise that the guy most responsible for getting Auburn to its first Final Four is a junior guard, Jared Harper.

And no surprise that the three guards who steered Texas Tech to its first Final Four include two sophomores (Jarrett Culver and Davide Moretti, the team's top two scorers) and a senior (Matt Mooney, the team's third leading scorer).

And Virginia?

Leaned heavily on junior guard and former Indiana Mr. Basketball Kyle Guy, the Cavaliers did.

March after March the verities come home to roost, and one of the most constant is that the teams that get to this coming weekend almost always have reliable guard play, and more times than not it's veteran guard play. The one-and-dones might make for appointment viewing, but it's frequently the guys who actually know their way around campus you wind up watching the longest. And almost always at least one of them is the guy (or guys) bringing the ball up the floor.

It's a veteran guard's tournament, often as not. And that pattern holds again this year.

Even if so many other patterns so often don't.