Louisville players react to teammate Kevin Ware's gruesome leg injury Sunday. Reuters

This was supposed to be a story about the joy of reaching the Final Four but I suspect we're all going to be talking for some time about what happened with about 6½ minutes left in the first half of Sunday night's Louisville-Duke quarterfinal in Indianapolis. Duke was on offense, and Louisville guard Kevin Ware leapt to defend a three-point shot, and when he landed, he appeared to grimly snap his lower right leg, and fell to the ground. As medical personnel swarmed Ware in front of the Cardinals' bench, his teammates fell to the ground, horrified. What exactly had happened? Replays on CBS confirmed a terrible injury. A cold hush covered Lucas Oil Stadium. Ware's coach, Rick Pitino, huddled his team in tears. Duke players stood silently, shaken. The NCAA tournament is typically such a centrifuge of energy and noise. This was silent and brutal. A three-week circus with 68 teams suddenly meant so much less than the immediate future of one young man lying crumpled on the floor.

University of Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware is recovering from two hours of surgery following a gruesome leg injury during the team's Elite Eight NCAA game against Duke on Sunday. Jason Gay reports. Photo: Getty Images

Basketball is a game that takes off and lives in the air. At least the best parts of basketball live there—the highflying dunks, the merciless blocked shots, the aerial acrobatics and improvisations that are both so commonplace and staggering and give the game its electric soul. And with every jump and defiance of gravity there is a faith that what goes up will always come quietly down. It doesn't matter if you're playing in the NCAA or the NBA or in the driveway with your kids. You go up, you go down and you go up again: That's the expectation, the contract. Every flight books a return. This occurs hundreds and hundreds of times a game without anyone noticing or appreciating its reliability. And so what happened to Kevin Ware seemed like a violation of the code of a beautiful, airborne game. Ware jumped, but did not return safely to earth.

Michigan players celebrate toward the end of their 79-59 victory over Florida. Reuters

Did the injury affect things? It feels like such a crass question. Of course it affected things. Ware was removed on a stretcher, and Duke and Louisville played on, the Cardinals leaving an empty seat on the bench for their missing teammate. It was close for a bit but then Louisville just hit the gas in a way that made clear that this was not going to be Duke's day. Maybe it would not have been Duke's day if nothing had happened to Kevin Ware. But it had, and the Cardinals were not letting this slip away. One of the most overused terms in sports is "emotional victory," and the emotion is almost always owed to something that's happened before the game, that has already been converted from sadness into inspiration. It's almost never so fresh and visceral. It's almost never like this.


After the 85-63 Louisville win, an exhausted-looking Pitino said that the injured Ware had encouraged his team before leaving the floor to an ambulance. "We're all distraught, and all he's saying is, 'Win the game,' while the bone is out of his leg," Pitino told CBS.

Now Louisville—which looks awfully hard to beat—moves onto a Final Four which includes Syracuse, Wichita State and Michigan. One of these 2013 finalists is not like the others, as the old Sesame Street song goes. The Shockers of Wichita State, a lively gift to the National Association of Easy Headline Writers, are in their first Final Four since 1965. They are more Cinderella-ish than Cinderella, but they'll slip neatly into the necessary underdog/darling role next weekend in Atlanta. Wichita State got here by beating the best: No. 2-seeded Ohio State on Saturday, and before that, top seed Gonzaga, whose No. 1 ranking in the polls entering the tournament had a dubious, "World's Greatest Cup of Coffee" feel. Wichita gets Louisville on Saturday.

Michigan, meanwhile, is back in the Four the first time in 20 years, the last time being in 1993 with the Fab Five. The Wolverines are still in this thanks to the Game of the Tournament—let's give it a slight edge over FGCU's dumping of Georgetown—a stunning final-minute comeback versus Kansas to secure overtime and eventually a win. They're led by a point guard named Trey Burke, who froze the Jayhawks in the close of regulation with a three-point shot he launched from somewhere in the Upper Peninsula. After swamping Florida in the Elite Eight on Sunday, Michigan will face Syracuse, which on Saturday held Marquette to a pathetic 39 points in 40 minutes—roughly what you could score if you threw cans of frozen peas from the stadium's upper deck.

(A polite word about something maddening this March Madness: I know we're supposed to be agog about buzzer-beaters and last-minute thrillers—except for Michigan/Florida, wow, that game felt like a school play that would never end—but something needs to be done to accelerate the action in the final moments of close games. The endless drag of interruptions from timeouts and ticky-tack fouls, bricked free throws, more fouls, more timeouts, the corresponding commercials…during the Wichita State-Ohio State, the commercial breaks seemed to have commercial breaks. I've seen canoes whittled in the time it takes to play the final two minutes of a college-basketball game.)

But this is a petty worry right now. College basketball is a messy, often unscrupulous business, but in these final weeks it also becomes very meaningful for the players who participate. Most of these players are desperate to get where Louisville, Michigan, Syracuse and Wichita State are going. But some are just happy to be chosen for the moment. Win or lose, they get to walk off the floor with a memory. Whether it's next year or not, or some other time down the road, I hope Kevin Ware of Louisville gets back to this tournament to make another memory. He deserves a perfect landing.