“If there was ever a time to rob a bank in Kentucky, this is it,” Lieberman remembers joking. “Everybody in the state was either in that building or at home watching the game. That was the night to commit a crime.”
Take note, Duke and North Carolina. When you meet your archnemesis in the Final Four, this is what it looks like: In the days leading up to the Cats-Cards collision in 2012, two men at a dialysis clinic, one already hooked up to the machine, got in a fistfight over their allegiances. So, yeah, we’ve done Basketball Armageddon before. And in the same city, no less. Kinda makes sense when you think about it. If the world is going to end, might as well be on Bourbon Street, numb to the pain with a strand of Mardi Gras beads in one hand and a Pat O’Brien’s hurricane in the other.
“What I remember was the palpable energy in the arena right before tip,” Antigua says. “The intensity was vibrating in there. You could just feel it in the building, the anticipation. It’s hard to describe. Just like, ‘OK, here we go.’ Like you’re at the top of a roller coaster, looking down like, ‘Holy shit, that’s steep.’”
Shawn Perry watched the game at home alone, because the lifelong Kentucky fan couldn’t risk friends and family talking over the television broadcast — or sitting on the remote and accidentally changing the channel at a critical moment.
Final Four rivalry Armageddon? What UNC, Duke can learn from 2012 Kentucky-Louisville - The Athletic
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