AMERICA AT LARGE/GEORGE KIMBALL:A buzzer-beating three-pointer helped the University of Kansas to their first national championship title in 20 years

PARDON ME if I feel like I'm living out the result of some Faustian bargain I hadn't even been aware I'd entered into. Something along the lines of, "All right, your alma mater can win the national championship, but in return you can never leave Texas".

My boys - otherwise known as the scrappy University of Kansas Jayhawks - were nine points down with 2:12 left to play in San Antonio on Monday night, only to tie the score on Mario Chalmers' heroic, buzzer-beating three-point basket. KU went on to prevail 75-68 in overtime to claim its third NCAA title - and its first in 20 years.

"Ten seconds to go and we think we're national champions," was the way a stunned Memphis coach John Calipari put it. "Then a kid makes a shot, and all of a sudden we're not."

Payback came a day later, when American Airlines grounded its entire fleet of MD80 aircraft, resulting in the cancellation of over 500 flights nationally, and pretty much all of them departing San Antonio and Austin. Which is why, two days later, I'm still Deep in the Heart of Texas. . .

Those uninitiated in the world of American fun and games are often baffled by the passionate interest invested in the NCAA's annual basketball tournament. From the time the 65-team draw is announced in mid-March, men - and women - who have never been near a college campus spend hours meticulously filling out their brackets before making their contributions to an estimated $5 billion that is wagered on the event each year, and then become slaves to the television set over the next three weekends as they follow the fortunes of their adopted schools.

A business consulting firm recently estimated that in terms of man-hours, the lost productivity engendered by the NCAA tournament adds up to a $3.8 billion annual hit. Monday night's championship game was watched by a television audience of over 40 million, and upwards of 43,000 jammed into San Antonio's Alamodome to watch live.

Nowhere is basketball tradition more deeply rooted than at Kansas, where the programme was initiated by Dr James Naismith, the man who had invented the sport back in 1891. In his dotage, Dr Naismith would later serve the university as an assistant coach under the legendary Forrest "Phog" Allen. This was an arrangement not unlike, say, the physics department hiring Thomas A Edison to be a laboratory adjunct.

I'd covered my share of NCAA tournaments over the years, but none in which my alma mater had been involved, so I'd never attended a Final Four burdened by emotional attachments. (The Jayhawks had played for the national championship on seven occasions. Their first win came in 1952, when I was nine years old, and the other in 1988, 23 years after I last sat in a classroom in Lawrence.)

Last weekend I'd opted to go to San Antonio as a civilian.

Unless you were paying careful attention, the 2008 edition of the Jayhawks had been a pretty easy team to overlook. (Suffice it to say that their unexpected win wrecked a lot of NCAA pools.) In an event that serves as a showcase for NBA stars-to-be, there were no flashy superstars to be found on the Kansas roster. Their leading scorer, guard Brandon Rush, averaged just 13.3 points per game, but, in keeping with the team concept of coach Bill Self, he was one of four Kansas players whose scoring average was in double figures.

"You can't explain it," said forward Darnell Jackson. "We're a balanced team - and a lot of teams don't have that."

The shared glory even extended to the Kansas reserves. The Jayhawks would probably have never reached the Final Four but for Sasha Kaun, the 6ft 11in senior from Russia who came off the bench to make all six of his field goal attempts, score 13 points and pull down six rebounds in KU's 59-57 squeaker over Davidson in a quarter-final in Detroit a week earlier.

And in Saturday night's semi-final win over North Carolina, with both Jackson and Kaun encountering early foul trouble, Self turned to another big man, 19-year-old freshman Cole Aldrich, who responded with eight points, seven rebounds and three blocked shots while playing NCAA Player of the Year Tyler Hansborough to a standstill in the 17 minutes he was on court. While Aldrich was on the floor, the Jayhawks led the favoured Tar Heels by as many as 28 points before settling for an 84-66 win and a place in the final against Memphis, winners of 39 of 40 games and the tournament's top seed.

With just over two minutes to play on Monday night it appeared that was where it was going to end. Calipari's Tigers appeared to have matters well in hand with their nine-point advantage, but Self countered with what is usually a desperation tactic, ordering his players to deliberately foul, and found in the process Memphis' Achilles' heel.

(Ironically, just a day earlier Calipari had been asked about this very scenario. His terse reply had been, "We spend no time thinking about free-throw shooting. Strong-minded players will make their free throws.")

When Chris Douglas-Roberts and Derrick Rose, the Tigers' two best players, missed four free throws down the stretch, Kansas was able to creep within striking distance, though I must confess I nearly missed seeing Chalmers' heroic shot go in. I'd been watching KU guard Sherron Collins dribble up court as the last seconds ticked off the clock, and when Collins stumbled, nearly falling on his face, he lost control of the ball as well. I was about to bury my face in my hands when Collins reached out and slapped the ball to Chalmers, who did the Texas two-step falling as he put up the shot, with Rose right in his face.

The Boston Globe'sBob Ryan described it as "a game-tying shot for the ages - a drifting, altitudinous, right-to-left straightaway three-pointer".

"It was," said Self, "probably the biggest shot in Kansas history."

At this point the rest seemed almost perfunctory. Kansas scored the first six points of the overtime period and never looked back. It was as if the result had been foreordained.

Within an hour, the Alamo was once again under siege, and thousands of fans wearing blue-and-red Jayhawk T-shirts were carousing through the night along the Riverwalk in downtown San Antonio.

Of course, if they'd known then what they know now, they might have paced themselves a little better. The airplanes are still grounded, and the T-shirts are getting a bit ripe.