A step away. Still.

 For a moment yesterday afternoon, maybe more than that, it was right there. A free throw splashed, and on the floor and in the stands and up in Fort Wayne, where it mattered to fewer people than it should have, they could feel it -- a hand gripping the elbow; a whisper in the ear; a promise made 24 years ago at last being kept.

And then ...

And then, it was gone.

Down on the Corteva Coliseum floor in Indianapolis, a young woman named Jenna Guyer bottomed a pair of threes, then drove hard to the tin for a layup, and the top-seeded Green Bay Phoenix led 60-53 in the Horizon League women's championship game. And the NCAA Tournament berth that was right there for the Purdue Fort Wayne women had instead brushed past them like a ghost.

Score with 2:56 to play in the third quarter, after Jordan Reid knocked down that free throw: PFW 51, Green Bay 50.

Score when the clock finally shed its final seconds: Green Bay 76, PFW 63.

That's a 26-12 Phoenix advantage across the last 12:56, if you're keeping score at home.

That's yet another year of falling short of that 24-year-old promise, made when then-IPFW  made the jump to Division I and the NCAA Tournament became an actual possibility for both men and women. Coming up on a quarter-century later, it remains one very hard step away, even as the women won 25 games and had their best season in school history.

But you know what?

Yesterday wasn't the first time the Mastodons got close enough to leave fingerprints.

First time it happened was 11 years ago, and it was weirdly, almost eerily, similar. PFW was still IPFW then, and still a member in good standing of the Summit League. The Mastodon men upset South Dakota State to get to the conference championship game that year, then cold-jumped top-seeded North Dakota State out of the gate in the title bout -- burying 5-of-10 from the 3-point arc in the first half to take a 35-27 lead into halftime.

But the Bison wouldn't stay dead.

 A run early in the second half got them back even, and, after 13 lead changes, a young man named Taylor Braun drove for a layup with 1:18 to play. That made it 56-55, North Dakota State, and the scoreboard would never tilt back to the Mastodons again.

It ended 60-57. IPFW, so hot early, made just two field goals across the final 10:10.

And yesterday?

Like the men in 2014, the PFW women smoked it from the arc in the first half, sticking 7-of-12 threes to reach halftime all even with Green Bay at 40-40. And, like the men in 2014, the women ran out of gas down the stretch, missing their first six shots of the fourth quarter and going 7:12 without a field goal.

Eleven years ago, two field goals in the last ten minutes.

Yesterday, no field goals for more than seven of the last ten minutes.

And -- ah, crap -- deja blues all over again.