Armour: Wisconsin gets revenge, ruins Kentucky's historic season

INDIANAPOLIS — Whenever someone would describe Kentucky as perfect these last few weeks, John Calipari was quick to correct them.

His team wasn't perfect, he would say, just unbeaten.

Now it's neither.

The Wildcats' quest for perfection ended a game short of a shot at the national championship Saturday night, stopped cold by a Wisconsin team with a long memory and even better long-range shooting. Tied at 60 with fewer than two minutes to play, Sam "Dagger" Dekker drilled a three-pointer and then forced a Kentucky turnover at the other end by taking a charge.

When Karl-Anthony Towns missed the second of two free throws, which would have pulled the Wildcats within one with 16 seconds left, player of the year Frank Kaminsky got the rebound and all that was left was the fouling.

The final score was 71-64, the record 38-and-no.

"It takes everything away," Tyler Ulis said. "All the wins mean nothing."

Calipari tried to spin a different narrative, saying the loss shouldn't detract from everything his players accomplished this season. It wasn't just the 38 games without a loss. It was the way this dazzling array of stars had bought into the team concept, willingly sacrificing minutes and points for the collective good.

"They took us on an absolute ride as a coach, our staff, this university, our state. You're not going to take it away," Calipari said. "They're hurting right now, but when they look back on this time … incredible stuff."

He is right, of course. But history is a heartless judge, with no love for almosts or close calls. That 1991 UNLV team isn't remembered for the 34 wins that started the season, it's remembered for the one that ended it.

And so it will be for Kentucky.

Five years from now, no one but Kentucky fans will remember the Wildcats' unselfishness. Or their stingy defense. The maturity and grace with which the players handled the ever-shrinking fishbowl they found themselves in will be appreciated by few besides them and their families.

Harsh as it is, the lasting memory of this Kentucky team will be the last five minutes of the game against Wisconsin.

"Pride's one thing," Willie Cauley-Stein said. "A championship is another."

But Calipari was right. This was never a perfect team.

It had one of the best defenses the game has ever seen, an imposing and impenetrable wall of arms and legs. To play Kentucky was to have the breath choked out of you one possession at a time. And while it had one of the purest shooters in Aaron Harrison and one of the biggest gamers in his twin brother, Andrew, its offense was always a little bit suspect.

Most games that didn't matter. But that was never going to be the case against Wisconsin.

Wisconsin was less than six seconds from the second title game appearance in school history last year when Aaron Harrison drove a dagger deep into the Badgers' guts in the form of an NBA-range three-pointer. The scar from that wound has healed, but the fury over the blow has lingered.

One player said there is rarely a day that he doesn't think about how the game ended, while another said he watches the replay almost every day. Disappointment like that will either crush a soul or spark a raging fire, and it was the latter for the Badgers.

"Make 'em believe" was the slogan on the T-shirt that player of the year Kaminsky held aloft as the final buzzer sounded.

"Make 'em pay," ought to have been more like it.

"What impacted the game the most was Wisconsin and how they played," Calipari said when asked if the burden of trying to become the first unbeaten team since Indiana in 1976 weighed on his team down the stretch.

"I'll be honest, for me, I wasn't thinking 40-0," Calipari added. "I was just trying to win the game, get on to another game."

There will be no more games, not this season anyway. Instead of making history, Kentucky became it instead.

Follow columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.

GALLERY: ALL THE HIGHLIGHTS FROM WISCONSIN-KENTUCKY