The first time your heart sank like a submarine –if you’re an Oregon basketball fan –was somewhere around December 10, 2001.
That’s when you watched the Ducks lose, on national television, in a nail-biter to Minnesota on the road, their third-straight loss to sub-par competition.
That’s when you made your spring break plans, scoured the Internet for some Fiesta Bowl hype and wrote off another basketball season like a tax break.
Little did you know that the 2001-02 campaign would turn into an unexpected present, a gift from a team that will be written off only at the top of the Oregon record books.
Soon after the football smoke cleared, the basketball squad had swept Arizona, beat Stanford for the first time and was riding a wave of media hype to the very pinnacle of the Pacific-10 Conference. Road losses at Washington, California and Stanford tagged Oregon with the “road woes” label, but the Ducks would peel off that label later.

At home Oregon continued to dominate with a brand of play that previously existed only in poetry and fiction. Soaring dunks, laser-accurate treys, alley-oops that defied all of Newton’s laws.
And when the season came to a close, the Ducks were winning the type of games they lost in the preseason, against teams far better than any piecemeal preseason foe. The final doubters were cut down by last-minute wins at USC and UCLA that sealed the Ducks’ first outright Pac-10 title since 1939.
Then came the NCAA Tournament run that began with the surprising revelation that the Ducks would be a No. 2 seed in the Big Dance. Oregon would dismantle No. 15 Montana, survive No. 7 Wake Forest and barely survive No. 6 Texas before running into a rebounding wall in top-seeded Kansas.
Now go into the Oregon locker room, deep within the bowels of the Kohl Center in Madison, Wis., after that game.
If at that moment you could step into Guy Pearce’s Time Machine and set the clock for Dec. 10, 2001, you would see yourself sitting in front of the television with that worried look in your eye. You have your pen out, ready to write off the Ducks. But tell yourself that in a few months, Oregon will be Pac-10 Champs, Elite Eight participants and the undisputed best team West of Lawrence, Kansas.
You’d be ecstatic.
But not the Ducks.
Go back to Wisconsin. After most of the media pests have cleared out, after all the questions, Luke Ridnour sits against a locker, head bowed. Freddie Jones sits lodged into a corner, the back of his head pressed hard against the cold metal and a blank expression on his face. The always-upbeat Chris Christoffersen answers questions in a low monotone. Luke Jackson is barely audible when he speaks, despite the near-silence in the room.
It is this mentality that will get the Ducks back to this position in the future. The idea that no matter how far they go, it won’t be far enough until a National Championship banner hangs in the Mac Court rafters to accompany the 1939 championship.
Ernie Kent said the Ducks got so close to the Final Four they could practically taste it. Maybe that taste will turn into a full-blown appetite for winning that will put Oregon into the national picture in the same way the football team is now consistently dominating the
national scene.
When the Ducks lost that game at Minnesota on Dec. 10, their disappointment turned into resolve and they promptly went 22-6 over their next 28 games.
Now, disappointment must turn to resolve again if Oregon is to make it back to the Elite Eight
and beyond.