FanHouse Stanley Robinson

DETROIT -- On command, when a local kid named Durrell Summers lifted off and nearly decapitated Stanley Robinson with a vicious dunk, a moving wave of green-swept humanity rose and rocked. Yes, your honor, this was a ridiculous homecourt advantage, a home-FIELD advantage of about 45,000 local crazies in a 72,500-seat football stadium, an advantage in ways freakishly unprecedented in the fiercely neutral extravaganza known as the Final Four.

Ford Field is guilty as charged.

And not a soul with a conscience should complain about it.

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Here's a question to nibble on between games: Where would Michigan State have finished in the Big East?

Remember the Big East? The monster conference of all-time? The beast? The 16-team behemoth that grabbed three of the four No. 1 seeds in this tournament? That just 10 days ago had a chance to have four teams in the Final Four?

Well, the champions of the Big Ten have just taken out two of those No. 1 Big East seeds en route to the NCAA title game, in which they will play the winner of tonight's Villanova-North Carolina game Monday night. They've done it with grit and toughness and hard-core rebounding -- qualities we normally associate with the Big East but of which Michigan State has brought truckloads to this tournament.

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Take everything you think you know about this Final Four and toss it in the waste bin with the scrap paper that was once your brackets. The brackets that had Pittsburgh meeting Louisville for the national title. The brackets that were oh so certain Michigan State of the overrated Big Ten would, exactly like IKEA furniture, collapse after one week. The brackets that said Wake Forest was underrated and Arizona's bid was a career achievement award.

Forget it all, because like your brackets, this Final Four will be all about what you didn't know.

This is a thank-you note.

On behalf of basketball fans everywhere, thank you, Missouri, for a brilliant run and a tough, impressive effort against Connecticut in the regional final. You gave us a great game to watch, and you really made the Huskies earn their way into the Final Four. And everybody should have to earn their way into the Final Four.

The way this thing started, it looked like a rout. UConn raced to that huge early lead, and you figured, "Oh well. Mismatch."

But then a funny thing happened. Missouri didn't go away.

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