Welcome back, Georgia Tech. ACC champion Yellow Jackets have been missed.
It had been too long. That much was undeniable. The programs that built the ACC into what it was, and then what it is today, have risen and fallen, even come and gone.
Georgia Tech bottomed out and, Saturday, finally rose again.
The ACC made it to the finish line of this bizarre pandemic-plagued season to crown a throwback champion. The fourth-seeded Yellow Jackets were the last team standing, taking down defending champion* Florida State, 80-75, on Saturday for their first ACC title since 1993.
Unlike Florida State last year, Georgia Tech actually had to win a game to claim the trophy. Unlike any of their predecessors for more than three decades, the Yellow Jackets only had to win two.
They were out of practice: A premature court rush gave Florida State two extra points at the end, but it didn’t matter. The celebration was only delayed, not diminished in any way.
Jose Alvarado, Georgia Tech’s defensive stopper and spiritual leader, was first to cut down the nets, his cheeks still wet from the tears that flowed during an emotional postgame interview with ESPN. He had one of the nets around his neck, a snip of twine tucked in his hat and threw another to his daughter in the stands.
“I’m going to take this home and put it in my collection and no one can touch this,” Alvarado said, holding up his netlace.
On the baseline, Moses Wright, the ACC player of the year from Raleigh’s Enloe High, sat in a chair while his teammates hugged and kicked balloons into the air, overcome with emotion.
It had been a long time coming for Georgia Tech. Too long.
“They always talk about Georgia Tech in the ‘90s and Bobby Cremins,” GT coach Josh Pastner said. “It’s all anyone wants to talk to me about. Now we’ve done something they’ve done too, which I’m happy about. I hope we can have one-fourth the success coach Cremins had.”
Florida State has been one of the great powers of ACC basketball for a while, even more now than when the Seminoles won their first title in 2012. They played for the title in 2019, won it by default last year and played for it again Saturday. For whatever reason — the lack of corresponding NCAA tournament success probably foremost — the Seminoles don’t get the same credit Virginia does for breaking through the ACC’s blue ceiling. But they most certainly have.
Georgia Tech is a different story. Since their arrival in 1978, the Yellow Jackets produced some of the most spellbinding teams and players of the ACC’s nine-team basketball glory days, the laboratory product of Cremins, the floppy-haired mad scientist. The last time before Saturday the ACC championship was decided without a team from North Carolina, in Charlotte in 1990, Georgia Tech claimed the title. There was a spasm of relevance under Paul Hewitt and an unlikely Final Four run in 2004, but it was never sustainable. The past decade of Georgia Tech basketball has been as forgettable as some of its predecessors were memorable.
That irrelevance left a giant void in the basketball soul of the ACC. Yes, Duke and North Carolina may be the metronome by which the conference has ticked along for many years now, but N.C. State and Virginia and Wake Forest and Georgia Tech (and Maryland) have also filled those roles, creating the friction that kept things hot. At various times, they were part of the hierarchy, as Florida State is now. At other times, they have fallen off the radar completely.
Just as college football is better in the state of North Carolina when East Carolina and Appalachian State are capable of challenging and even exceeding their ACC neighbors, ACC basketball is better when the schools that built the league into what it was are again part of the conversation. Wake Forest has been absent for too long. So too was Georgia Tech, until now. N.C. State feels perpetually on the verge.
Because for all of them, the tradition still lies underneath, dormant as it may be, and the right coach and right players have a chance to resurrect it. Tony Bennett not only reawakened the echoes on the grounds, he did what Terry Holland and Ralph Sampson never could at Virginia.
Who knew Georgia Tech would need a goofy Pollyanna in a useless, battered face shield with his shirt hanging out and his COVID contact tracker dangling from his neck on a lanyard like a set of keys and sideburns running amok to channel the spirit of Cremins and “Lethal Weapon 3” to conjure magic out of a decidedly difficult season.
“I’m not really cool,” Pastner said. “Sometimes it might be cool to be me because I’m so uncool.”
Pastner thinks every ACC team should be in the NCAA tournament and every other coach in the league should be in the Hall of Fame, but that relentless positivity just happened to fit this messed-up season like a spike protein in a lung cell.
Don’t let the goofball act fool you: He built a basketball team, too. He turned Wright, a kid from the heart of the ACC no one else wanted, into the best player in the ACC and built as good and versatile a backcourt as there is in the league, balancing the scrap of Alvarado with the intensity of Michael Devoe, while rotating through just about every defense that was ever put on a VHS tape.
Pastner’s many defenses cooked up 25 Florida State turnovers on Saturday, leading to 31 Georgia Tech points, as much as anything the deciding factor in the game. Alvarado, the league’s best defensive player, had the steal that fed Devoe, the tournament MVP, for the title-clinching basket and an eighth straight win that meant so much more.
“This mattered so much for Georgia Tech,” Pastner said. “It was really, really important for Georgia Tech to be back in the upper echelon of the ACC. It’s been a long time.”
This tournament lost something when it lost Duke and Virginia along the way, and the path of both of the finalists was smoothed in a way it hasn’t been for decades, but even with just one preliminary game each — Florida State beat North Carolina and avoided Duke; Georgia Tech beat Miami and dodged Virginia — they earned their way here through the ups and downs of a topsy-turvy season.
That’s nothing new for Florida State, a fixture in this spot now. It’s something old for Georgia Tech, and it’s good for everyone to have the Yellow Jackets back.
This story was originally published March 13, 2021 at 10:49 PM.
