Both Puget Sound and St. Thomas ran the table in their respective conferences, but only one emerged unscathed in Friday's Sweet 16 showdown. The Tommies shot 54 percent in their 86-69 victory. It's apparently the first road victory in St. Thomas history, a fact I find stunning.

The top-ranked Tommies advance to Saturday's game against No. 2 Washington University, the defending national champion.

I don't have any details since I was "stuck" doing my day job, but St. Thomas Vice President Doug Hennes went all newspaper guy on his recap. SID Gene McGivern was busy updating his blog and doing an in-game blog.

What's next? The Tommies are three wins from the greatest basketball season in MIAC history, and one of the most impressive seasons in the history of college basketball. If you believe the rankings, Saturday's game is the de-facto national championship game. Too bad the crowd will likely be small and quiet compared to what it deserves.

Naturally, I'll be working again and miss all the fireworks. Perhaps even worse, I'll be watching a stud headed to St. Thomas next year tear apart "my" team. The rich get richer, I guess.

What was Tubby Smith doing five hours after coaching his way out of the NCAA tournament? He was giving pre-game speeches to both St. Thomas and Steven's Point, apparently.

I didn't make an official sighting, but the stats can't be mere coincidence. How else do you explain the horrendous perimeter shooting (22.5 percent), rash of missed layups and general offensive malaise on display? The Tommies scored 26 points less than their average and shot almost 20 percent below their season average. The Pointers finished 24 points below their average and shot 14 percent worse than normal.

Plain and simple, it was Tubby Time in the final game ever played at The Shoe. It made for an ugly display of basketball between two of the best teams in the nation, though the Tommies survived and that's all that matters in March. They travel to Wheaton next weekend to play Puget Sound, who finished the #7 in the final D3Hoops.com poll.

Joking aside, was the slow start by design? Tommie assistant coach Johnny Tauer had asked Gustavus coach Mark Hanson for advice in beating the Pointers earlier in the week. The response was classic Hans.

"Let them get ahead by 10 early so they don't take you seriously. Being up at halftime certainly didn't work for us."

The Tommies tried to follow that advice. Here's a glance at their possessions over the first eight minutes of the game: turnover, miss, miss, miss, MAKE, turnover, turnover, miss, turnover, miss, turnover, miss. The Pointers were equally as inept, leaving the score at a very Gophers-like 6-5 with 11:52 remaining. It never really got much better. Somewhere Tubby had to be smiling.

Even on crutches, I'm pretty sure I could have played a more aesthetically pleasing game of 1v1 with former Macalester scrapper Adam Denny. Assuming no fouls would get called, anyway. We were hackers.

For the first time in awhile, I've got no major beef with the way things were officiated. The fouls and free throws were almost exactly even and there were no egregious mistakes. But that doesn't really tell the whole story, judging by the reactions from the UWSP coach and the various MIAC coaches sitting in my section.

Every game is filled with 50/50 calls, some of which are called and some that aren't. As a largely unbiased observer, I'd say the Tommies owned the 50/50 calls by a count of at least 80/20. I'm not sure that it changed the outcome, but it certainly was a factor — the Pointer big men battled foul trouble all night. You could literally see the Steven's Point coach begin to boil as every close call went against him, particularly down the stretch.

So what's the bottom line? The Tommies claimed an ugly, impressive win over one of the best programs in Division III. In many ways, it finally legitimized the product St. Thomas has been putting on the court all year.

As I reflected on the performance while crutching down the stairs, Hanson disappeared for a few minutes. I've got to imagine he either spotted Tubby or wanted to help pull the playoff gorilla off Fritz's back.