Final(ly) Four

 We begin with a refresher of sorts, on the morning after Zach Edey and Co. took the Purdue Boilermakers where no Boilermaker has gone before, or at least since a day lost in the mists of time.

In other words, class: Just how long ago was March 1980, the last time Purdue reached the Final Four?

Well, in March 1980, Jimmy Carter was still president.

Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were NBA rookies.

John Lennon was still nine months away from meeting Mark David Chapman.

John Belushi was alive. Tiger Woods was 4. The Star Wars franchise was still just one movie; the Star Trek franchise still just one TV series; and  no one in West Lafayette, In., had yet heard of a man named Gene Keady, then the 43-year-old head basketball coach at Western Kentucky.

A month later he was the new head coach at Purdue.

Forty-four years after that, on the last day of March, a 7-foot-4 Boilermaker 66 years Keady's junior clipped a few strands of net in Detroit, Mich., then marched over and handed him a strand. And hugged him.

I don't know if you can call that closing a circle, or anything so high-falutin' and cosmic.  But it sure as hell was something.

It was something because the program Gene Keady built on guts and will and the decidedly un-cosmic mantra of Play Hard finally reached a place he could never quite take it, and here was Zach Edey acknowledging it even if he never played for the man. This is, after all, Matt Painter's program now. But damned if it still doesn't have Gene Keady's fingerprints all over it.

Everything about this team breathes Keady, and it was hard not to see that Sunday as Edey punished Tennessee with 40 points and 18 boards, and Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer and all the rest gutted out an uncharacteristically lousy shooting day. These Boilers, they are tough and relentless and selfless in a way hardly seen anymore, and did we mention tough and relentless.

Sure, Tennessee dinged them for 11 threes in 26 attempts to keep it close. But the Purdues harassed the Volunteers into 13-of-36 shooting from everywhere else -- 36 percent, if you're keeping score at home. And when the Vols missed, Edey or someone else was there to clean up the mess; Purdue finished with a gargantuan 47-26 advantage on the glass, perhaps the biggest reason it survived and advanced.

And what is rebounding, boys and girls? What is getting in the face of the shooter?

Thaaat's right. Ain't nothin' but Play Hard. Ain't nothin' but settin' the jaw and gettin' after it.

And so the Boilers set their jaws and got after it -- has anyone ever set his jaw like Braden Smith, for pity's sake? -- and Edey got a huge block as the outcome teetered, and then he took a pair of scissors and went snip-snip-snip. And then he handed most of what he snipped to Gene Keady, because without Gene Keady there's no Matt Painter, and without Matt Painter and the Keady legacy upon which he has so worthily built, there's no Final Four for the first time in 44 years.

Hang onto that hunk of nylon, Coach. It's been a long time in coming.