No MAAC team had won an N.C.A.A. tournament game since 2009, when Siena beat Ohio State. But on a Thursday in Indianapolis, St. Peter’s turned a night of skillful shooting, including 18 points from the free-throw line, into a victory over Kentucky. Then came a second-round win over Murray State.
On Friday night in Philadelphia, where St. Peter’s beat mighty Purdue, the Peacocks became the first 15th-seeded team to reach the men’s tournament’s round of 8. (The competition, which began with eight teams in 1939, first began a seeding system in 1979, when the field featured 40 teams.)
“With hindsight, we’ve all learned what we’ve learned,” said Burnett, who is also the commissioner of the Southland Conference, whose champion, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, was seeded 16th and lost a play-in game to Texas Southern. “It’s probably relative to what other people were thinking about St. Peter’s before their tournament and they won and all that.”
St. Peter’s, which had thrived with menacing defense, a sterling duo of free-throw shooters and a knack for rebounding, knew it would next face one of the most prestigious programs in college basketball, either North Carolina or U.C.L.A. Between them, they had amassed 17 N.C.A.A. championships; St. Peter’s, in its history, had not won an N.C.A.A. tournament game until this month.
The North Carolina team that emerged from the round of 16 had, as recently as mid-February, hardly seemed like one of the finest ever to rise out of Chapel Hill. There had been humiliating regular-season losses to Kentucky, Miami and Wake Forest. Duke swaggered onto the Tar Heels’ home court in February and won by 20, and then North Carolina lost to Pittsburgh.
A team that had sometimes seemed adrift, though, never lost again in the regular season and capped it by making the drive over to Duke and upending Mike Krzyzewski’s final game at Cameron Indoor Stadium. The Tar Heels stumbled in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, but arrived at Wells Fargo Center on Sunday evening having lost just once since Feb. 19. They had beaten Baylor, the reigning men’s champion, in overtime in the N.C.A.A. tournament’s second round and then hounded U.C.L.A. out of Philadelphia.
