Author Of "The Perfect Game" Talks NCAA Basketball History

By John Ostapkovich

On this Final Four weekend, maybe it's time to remember when a Big Five team had reached this improbable height on the way to winning it all.

Kyle Keiderling, author of "The Perfect Game," says it was in fact a golf game with a Villanova grad and one from Georgetown that inspired him to write the book, detailing Nova's 1985 NCAA basketball triumph. Keiderling says the game marked an end of an era, no shot clock, no three point shots, and coaches from two small Catholic schools with teams molded in their image.

"In John Thompson's case, it was 'us against the world.' Everybody's against us. We have to circle the wagons. We have to stick together. This is the way that we're going to do it and in Rollie Massimino's case, the team was an extension of his own Italian family."

Keiderling says Villanova took only 11 shots from the floor in the second half, but made ten of them, and made history.