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0.8 Seconds and One Family

By John Hawkes

What makes an event memorable?

What makes so many positive emotions--joy, pride, reverence, even nostalgia--immediately spring forth at the mere mention of a single, isolated moment sometime in the past?

What can make a group of disparate individuals spread across geography, age, and background feel as if, for a brief second, they were all together in the same place?

There are 86,400 seconds in a single day. Yet our greatest memories, the ones that bring forth all of these emotions and unite large groups of people behind a single happening--they're often made in just one second.

Or 0.8 seconds.

Six years ago tonight, in a far away place called Boise, Idaho, 0.8 seconds separated the 35-second shot clock and the final buzzer as Nat Burton held the ball near midcourt with Georgetown tied with Arkansas in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Across the country, a group of disparate individuals united by their love of Hoya basketball (and their consternation that point guard Kevin Braswell didn't have the ball in his hands) held their breath.

What happened next is common knowledge to Hoya fans of nearly every age. Burton's double buzzer-beating layup--he let go of the shot with exactly 0.8 seconds remaining, and the ball fell through the hoop as time expired--gave the Hoyas a 63-61 victory and set off joyful celebrations across the Hoya Nation.

For someone who was a freshman at Georgetown on March 15, 2001 it seems easy--almost trite--to say I remember exactly where I was when Nat Burton made that layup. We all remember exactly where we were. We've all committed to memory Rich Chvotkin's call of the final play ("My God, it's so good!"). We've all spoken reverently of "the Burton game" in casual conversation with Hoya fans. We all sub-consciously rooted a little harder for Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl this past January.

It is, in fact, too easy to say Nat Burton's big moment is so memorable because we all know exactly where were at that very moment. Similarly, it doesn't do the moment justice to conclude that the victory was important because it represented what was at the time (and remained) the biggest post-season triumph for an entire generation of Georgetown students.

So what exactly is it that made 0.8 seconds so memorable to such a large group of Hoya fans?

The most difficult question I've ever been asked as a Georgetown basketball fan was yelled at me by a man wearing face paint and a blue wig.

"Is this the greatest game ever?!?!?!" Kurt Muhlbauer said to me when I ran into him at the scorer's table after Georgetown beat #1 and undefeated Duke on the afternoon of January 21, 2006.

It took me about 0.8 seconds to answer back.

"YES!" I yelled into Kurt's ear over the screams of 20,000 Hoya fans.

It didn't seem difficult at the time--euphoria tends to make all things appear effortless.

But even if Kurt and I cut right to the chase in our post-game giddiness, I knew what lay at the heart of the question. He was making the same connection as I had a little over a year earlier, when after Roy Hibbert's last-second dunk (another buzzer-beater that survived an instant replay) gave GU an improbable victory over Notre Dame, I hugged him on his way off the court and said--"now you know what this feels like."

We were comparing these moments to the Burton game.

When I thought about Kurt's question later on, it didn't appear as simple. In fact, I'm not sure to this day that I've come up with an answer with which I'm comfortable. On one hand, I concede that the Duke victory has likely surpassed the Burton game in terms of how many people will remember exactly where they were when it happened, or who will have some universally-relatable story about their experience that day (in fact, I wrote an entire Generation Burton column consisting of stories about January 21, 2006 I heard from other Hoya fans). On the other, I belong to a generation of Georgetown students for whom the Burton game is, arguably, our single defining moment and is rightly given a special place in our hearts.

Over time though, I've come to the conclusion that one thing the Burton game and the Duke game have in common--and the reason I find both equally memorable in my mind...

...is unconditional happiness.

Unconditional happiness is the one thing that one emotion that unites all of the others--joy, pride, reverence, even nostalgia, and brings all of the disparate individual Hoya fans together at a moment like the Burton game or the Duke game.

If you walked down the halls of a Georgetown dorm room at around 9:45pm on Thursday March 15, 2001, or through campus on the night of Saturday January 21, 2006, you could not have gone a few steps without seeing a Georgetown student in a state of complete and unconditional happiness.

The phrase "I'm happy to be a fan of [BLANK]" is practically meaningless, so hackneyed that it's devoid of any emotional involvement.

Except on those occasions when it's the perfect description of how you're feeling.

When a student hangs a sign on John Carroll's statue in Healy Circle reading "WE BEAT DUKE" they're expressing their unconditional happiness at being fans of the team that slayed the great undefeated dragon of college basketball.

When Nat Burton and Craig Esherick say with a wink that the final play against Arkansas worked out exactly as they'd planned, they're caught up in the unconditional happiness that follows an unexpected and sudden victory.

When I listened to the students I'd camped out with overnight on F Street prior to the Duke game tell me in line how nervous they were, and smiled and assured them, "Guys, it's going to be a great day today," I was so unconditionally happy about where I knew my team would be in a few hours that I was immune to all other emotions.

And when a Georgetown fan yelled out every ten minutes or so to the throng of Hoya faithful in Cafe 31 on Saturday night: "Hey, remember when we won the Big East Championship?"

Well, he's just unconditionally happy.

Immediately after the CBS telecast of the Georgetown-Arkansas game ended, I walked out of my friend's room at the end of the hall on the 6th floor of Village C West, right into a scene I'd never seen before and never saw thereafter in my freshman year. Every door on the floor was open, and almost to a person every single one of my floormates had come out into the hallway to celebrate the victory.

These are the same floormates I used as the basis for the VCW6 Theory of Freshman Fans, wherein I stated that about fifty percent of the Georgetown student body would never be able to be converted into basketball fans. It's a fair bet to say I was watching the game with the only two other hardcore Hoyas fans on the floor. And yet on that night, in that one moment, Nat Burton and the Georgetown basketball team had brought together one rather disparate group of 32 freshmen from across the country in one joyous celebration, which I started off by running down the hall and high-fiving everyone in sight.

Flash forward to this past Saturday, immediately after John Thompson III has cut down the net at Madison Square Garden. As another joyous mob of Hoya fans celebrates Georgetown's first Big East Tournament championship since most of Generation Burton was in elementary school, I walked down from my seats in the 200 level and perched myself at the entrance to Section 116, just behind the Georgetown student section. And as the hordes of Hoya fans come walking up the aisles…I'm hit by what can only be described as a wave of unconditional happiness…

…and I start high-fiving everyone in sight.

In those few moments, I thought about the scene on my floor freshman year after the Burton game. I thought about how great moments in Georgetown basketball can bring Hoya fans together-whether it's 32 freshmen in Village C, or several thousand fans of all ages in Madison Square Garden.

In the photo albums I have from my first trip to New York City, I have photos with alums who graduated the year I was born, alums who graduated ten months ago, and students who won't graduate for another three and a half years. I met long-time friends from my days as a student, fans I'd known from our Young Alum section at the Verizon Center, and folks I'd only recognized previously by a screen name on the Hoyatalk boards.

When I first wrote about Generation Burton three years ago, I talked a lot about the "common atmosphere" that the Burton game created on campus-that brief moment when every student seemed to have basketball on their mind, and the entire university was united behind a common purpose. This was what my view was of Georgetown basketball at its very best…and that's why I still hold the Burton game in such high regard.

But in seven years as a Georgetown basketball fan, I don't think I've ever seen a better example of that "common atmosphere" than in the eight hours I spent between arriving at Penn Station and falling asleep in the Hotel Penn on Saturday March 10, 2007.

A common theme this season has been the notion of Georgetown basketball as a "family"-the message permeated the speeches at the 100th Anniversary Gala, and it frequently seeps into the lexicon of ESPN announcers doing yet another story about Patrick Ewing and/or John Thompson. And it's a great message if you take it in its metaphorical sense of a group of individuals united by a strong common bond providing for each other and maintaining a strong relationship and traditions through time.

But it's a heck of a lot more fun when it means high-fiving your floormates after a tournament victory, or raising a glass to the Big East Championship at Café 31, or leading a cheer in the same establishment for another famous member of the Georgetown "family"-Jeff Green's mom.

There have been a number of great moments this season for Georgetown fans-and hopefully many more to come. Chances are none of them will be as heart-stopping as Nat Burton's last-second layup in an NCAA Tournament game. But if this season thus far has been any indication, these Hoyas will likely provide us with many more chances to get together with our extended family of Hoya fans-and with that comes the opportunity for many great memories indeed.

My first chance will likely come around the time you read this column. On the sixth anniversary of Nat Burton Day-the first NCAA Tournament game I watched as a Georgetown Hoyas fan-I'll be in Winston-Salem attending my first NCAA Tournament game as a Georgetown fan.

This time though, rather than wondering whether the Hoyas can pull out a victory in an evenly-matched 7-10 game, Georgetown fans will simply be hoping their team doesn't follow in the footsteps of Iowa State, the #2 seed who fell to upstart #15 Hampton as their game-winning layup attempt at the buzzer rolled off the very same basket Nat Burton's had fallen through a few hours earlier.

I may not see a set of games this weekend that will match the craziness that was March 15, 2001 in Boise, Idaho-a day that featured four games decided by a combined seven points.

What I will see though are a few dozen Hoya Blue students on a bus trip from the Hilltop to Winston-Salem, a handful of Hoya Hoop Club buddies at an official Georgetown pre or post-game event, scores of alums and recognizable faces that will make the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum seem like the Verizon Center South, a few guys in WAG shirts in Section 202 that followed the same StubHub-or-Bust strategy I did…

…and hopefully Jeff Green's mom.

Tournament days are some of the longest days one can experience as a Hoya fan. I remember going to three interminable classes on the day of the Georgetown-Arkansas game and staring at the clock counting the minutes until tipoff (who knew that eight tenths of a second would soon figure so prominently in my evening!).

Tomorrow will be no exception-the Hoya Blue bus I'm traveling with leaves at 6:00am, or roughly seven hours from now as I type this sentence.

But I wouldn't rather be anywhere else than with my friends-my Hoya basketball family.

What makes a game so memorable?

What makes so many positive emotions spring forth at the mention of a single, isolated moment sometime in the past-the Burton game, We Beat Duke, the Big East Championship?

What can make a group of disparate individuals spread across geography, age, and backgrounds want to get up at 6:00am to take a bus to Winston-Salem?

Well, the same thing it's been all along, no matter what your Generation-the hope that you'll experience a moment of unconditional happiness, and the promise that you'll be doing it with the greatest family one could ever ask for.

Hopefully it will be quite a reunion tomorrow afternoon.

Be sure to look for me-I'll be wearing a Nat Burton is My Homeboy t-shirt.

Gotta represent your Generation in the family, after all.