Two points are nothing and everything
The tiny margin between glory and pain
Two points. That was the thing Kelvin Sampson kept saying, over and over again, maybe in spite of himself, maybe without realizing it: “two points.”
Sampson said a lot of things after Monday night’s 65-63 title game loss to Florida. He talked about how much he loved his team. How proud he was of them. How he could have, as a coach, done more to get them through the gauntlet the 2025 national champions Florida made said championship in the final few minutes, as the Gators Gators’d, the way they somehow always have during this tournament: no easy looks, no easy passes, no easy movements, extending every defensive action while constantly, savvily, uncannily generating just enough on the other end of the floor, none of which was consolation after the fact.
“You know, after 40 minutes, there’s a two-point difference,” Sampson said. “Just a two-point difference.”
Two points. A nonexistent gap. Miniscule. Laughable. Easily dismissed. A bucket. Small enough to not even care about in the regular season, or even the conference tournament, context prevailing. Not enough to affect the NET rankings, obviously. Analytically tiny. Two points is easy to write off.
Except now, in April, when two points is everything. Two points is one of several J’Wan Roberts shots that rimmed out. Two points is one of the many open 3s Houston didn’t make in the first half, when the best 3-point shooting team in the country went 2-of-12 from 3. Two points is a ridiculous Thomas Haugh flip-in and-one on a break. Two points is missed a goaltending call resulting in a Will Richard corner 3.
Two points is one of the other cold-blooded shots Richard banged home in the first half to keep his team in the game. Two points is an open Milos Uzan floater with seven and a half minutes left that, weirdly, barely even hit the rim.
Two points is Emanuel Sharp catching the ball after a well-designed set to get free on the last possession of the game, after a relentless, space-destroying Florida defense suddenly produces Walter Clayton flying at his previously abandoned defensive assignment. Two points is Sharp failing to shot fake, freezing, dropping the ball, and refusing to pick it up.
Two points is the margin. It is tiny. It is everything.
It is the thing coaches and players spend their entire seasons, their whole lives, hunting, fighting with everything in their power to control. It is every practice, every late-game situational run-through, every shootaround, every deep-six after missed free throws, every annoyed forced cheer for teammates who can’t get it right.
Two points is that little edge where life happens. You live and die on that two points.
Florida did it. Houston didn’t.
“I feel terrible,” J’Wan Roberts said.
Monday’s outcome should come as little surprise: Florida has been doing this all tournament. It’s funny, actually, that one of the more dominant teams in recent college basketball history — a team that generally pounded the best conference in the country and decisively won away games against Auburn and Alabama — will be remembered more for its ability to salvage broadly average performances in the tournament with late runs. But that’s what Florida did all March and April: play OK, incur a deficit, find a way to overcome.
Before the title game, Florida coach Todd Golden said his team would have to finish with 12 or fewer turnovers to win, a clear marker he and his staff had laid for success. (This is what coaches do, especially modern coaches like Golden: target specific stats. Do this, win. Fail to do this, lose. Hit your KPIs or die.) Florida had nine turnovers in the first half. Alex Condon, bless his heart, and who ended up making a few crucial plays throughout, had three travels in his first nine minutes on the floor. He looked, as on Saturday, utterly terrified.
Golden admitted his concern about this in a sideline interview at the half, and in the postgame, and rightly so: Houston was destroying Florida on the offensive glass, generating turnovers, not committing them, and monstering the shot-volume math. The Cougars had been putrid shooting from the field, but it was only.a matter of time before they hit a few shots.
Florida went in to halftime trailing by just 3 — without a single point from Walter Clayton, the first player since Larry Bird to put up 30 in consecutive Elite Eight and Final Four games. Yet the numbers looked ominous: The Gators would have to find a way to win without reaching its own personal performance review.
Which is, obviously, exactly what they did.
“We showed up, man,” guard Alijah Martin said. “We never blinked.”
The second half of the 2025 national title game was hardly a classic 20 minutes of basketball. From a sheer qualitative standpoint, it paled in comparison to dozens of games throughout the 2025 season — dozens of Florida performances, dozens of Houston games, dozens of random top-25 matchups we’ve been watching all year.
But emotionally, spiritually, it was a fitting 20 for a Gators team that found itself constantly battling back in the NCAA Tournament. UConn seized every margin. Texas Tech matchup-hunted (and Darrion Williams’d) Florida to their limit. Auburn was Auburn. Florida trailed in all of those games, often late and at key junctions. Every time, regardless of the specifics, Walter Clayton and Florida — mostly the former in the first three games, less so Monday night — figured it out on the fly.
Not that Houston didn’t manage something similar. Beyond the ridiculous win over Duke, this was possibly the toughest path to a title game any team has ever managed, and Houston — back to back Big 12 title winners, a team that had lost once since November — made it look uncomplicated.
Watching it again early Tuesday morning, it is remarkable how good Florida’s defense becomes in the second half. It’s hard to imagine the pressure it imposes on every Houston touch, every pivot, every screen action, every dribble, everything. The Cougars were masters of difficult shots all year, happy to take them in the knowledge they could either make the 3 or scuffle out an offensive rebound, and it’s wild how much that given self-assurance abandoned them down the stretch Monday night.
(There was also, in that mix, a really good setup on a Sharp screen with Roberts dumped to Cryer in the corner, who was called for out of bounds, which just sort of felt unlucky with 3:24 left to play — another margin the Cougars didn’t get.)
Every Houston possession starts five feet further from the rim than it should. Every pass is stressful. Even the rare possessions that end up working — like the Roberts drive with 4:30 on the clock that misses, only for Ja’Vier Francis to hammer home the tip dunk — are exclusively the result of immense resilience. Late in this game, physically and emotionally, Houston was the team trying, and failing, to overcome pressure.
“In this tournament, especially after the first round, every team you play is going to be really, really, really good,” Golden said. “You have to have the mental toughness to be able to withstand a little adversity.”
It is worth pausing for a moment to reckon with how good this Florida team is. Old heads (like us) won’t like to hear it, but analytically it has always been better than the back-to-back UF teams, and it just conquered the most stacked Final Four ever on its way to a national title. There is no equivocating this: This Florida, in this era, is one of the great championship teams ever.
That it did not accomplish its championship with pure aesthetic quality, or by double-digit dominance, does not minimize the accomplishment. Duke was that good. Houston was that good. Auburn was that good. Hell, Texas Tech was that good. College basketball, now, is that good.
After it was over, after Sharp’s mistake, as he kneeled in a private moment of immense pain, Clayton, who has known Sharp from high school, came to tap him on the back. We are friends, this is life, it will go on. It was an admission: Hey man. Unlucky. I didn’t really play well either.
Life is somehow more complicated, and also simpler, than that. Walter Clayton is a national champion. Emanuel Sharp is not. The difference was two points, a difference which will haunt Houston forever.
This is college basketball, at every stage of this month, heightened by stakes: Nothing matters but the outcome. Florida won the national title. Houston did not.
“They made one more play than we did,” Sampson said. “We lost by two points.”
Eamonn, what a writeup!! You managed to put on paper everything I had been thinking about this game and tournament and floridas run, but could have never put to words. And I imagine you somehow finished this around 2 am in a stupor of exhaustion and the post championship game adrenaline we all feel. I wonder in five years how this Florida team will be remembered, because they were so dominant at times but needed to fight to survive almost every tournament game. Watching them it felt like watching some plucky upstart underdog that just never gave up. Sad for kelvin and the houston players, but this final four really delivered, and i think is a fitting cap to a really fun season.
Side note, i couldnt help thinking about the pacino locker room speech from any given sunday while reading your article. Two points::a game of inches.
Cant wait to do this all again in November.
2 points is also the number of points that terrible missed goal tend would have given Houston. The game is different if it’s tied, of course, but it’s an interesting note.