Editor’s note: In the wake of the NCAA’s decision to cancel the 2020 tournament, The Athletic will be celebrating the best NCAA Tournament game played on each day over the course of the next three weeks. You can read the rest of the stories here.

Even after all this time, four words still ring in T.J. Sorrentine’s ears: from the parking lot! That’s what CBS broadcaster Gus Johnson exclaimed when Sorrentine, a 5-11 senior guard, nailed a 30-foot dagger in overtime to help lift Vermont to a 60-57 win over Syracuse in the first round of the 2005 NCAA Tournament. “I hear about it weekly, even to this day,” Sorrentine says. “Fans, social media, Twitter, Instagram. All of it. Everybody associates me with that shot, and I always say it’s because of the call. The call made the shot.”

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Pat Flannery’s ears are also still ringing, even though he’s no longer the coach at Bucknell. He left the sidelines in 2008 to work in the school’s development office. Now he travels the country as a de facto ambassador for the school, and he is a popular request when prospective students, including non-athletes, come on campus. “I’ll ask them when they first heard about Bucknell,” Flannery says. “They’ll say, ‘March Madness.’ I’m like, how long ago was that?’ ”

The answer is, exactly 15 years. March 18, 2005. On that night, the NCAA Tournament was rocked by a pair of seismic upsets: No. 13-seeded Vermont over No. 4 Syracuse, and No. 14 Bucknell over No. 3 Kansas. For both underdogs, it was the first NCAA Tournament win in the history of their schools. For the favorites, it was a memory whose pain has only dulled partly over time. For the rest of us, it remains an indelible piece of NCAA Tournament lore, a five-hour span on a long-ago Friday night that still feels crazy after all these years.

Both teams had enjoyed lots of wins that season, but also their fair share of drama.

Vermont began the 2004-05 campaign with an announcement from its coach, Tom Brennan, that he would retire at season’s end after 19 years. Brennan was one of the most popular coaches in the game, a delightful, quirky wiseacre who co-hosted a morning radio show on the side. He and the players assumed the job would go to Jesse Agel, a Vermont alum who had worked under Brennan there for nearly two decades, including the previous eight seasons as associate head coach. Agel, however, was informed he would not get promoted, and he was so distressed that he stepped away from the team for a while. He came back, but he was clearly disgruntled. The Catamounts continued to play even as the new athletic director was interviewing other candidates. “There was a lot of turmoil,” Sorrentine says. “It was a tough situation for everyone involved.”

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Bucknell, meanwhile, started out 14-4, including a head-turning win at No. 10 Pittsburgh on Jan. 2. In late January, however, Flannery, a 1980 Bucknell graduate who was in his 11th season as head coach, took a three-game leave of absence to deal with unhealthy stress. The Bison lost two of the games Flannery missed. Things got better when he returned, but it set an uncertain tone for the remainder of the season.

It speaks well of these teams’ talent and maturity that they played so well despite those difficulties. Vermont’s starting lineup included four seniors and had won the previous two America East tournaments, each time losing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The Catamounts opened the season with a game at No. 1 Kansas, leading the Jayhawks by four with under five minutes to play before losing, 68-61. They also played at North Carolina in late December, and even though they lost by 28 to the team that went on to win the NCAA championship, there was value in going toe to toe with the best of the best. They took that hubris into March Madness. “We had already been to the tournament twice,” Sorrentine says. “Now we wanted to win in the tournament. That was our mindset.”

The first-round opponent was Syracuse, which finished the regular season 24-6 and capped things off by winning three games in three days in Madison Square Garden to capture the Big East tournament championship. Many experts predicted Vermont would get steamrolled by the hot team; Sorrentine, for one, though, was excited about the idea of playing against the Syracuse 2-3 zone because it meant hoisting up a lot of 3-pointers.

The game was played in Worcester, Mass., a four-hour drive from the Vermont campus in Burlington. That gave the Catamounts a sense of comfort. Before the game, Sorrentine huddled in the locker room with Alex Jensen, a little-used 6-2 senior guard who was Sorrentine’s best friend. It was Jensen’s duty to pass along some words of wisdom, just as he had done all season. “We need to be down at halftime,” he told Sorrentine. “If we’re down, they’ll relax, and then we can beat ’em in the second half.”

As Jensen hoped, Vermont came back to the locker room trailing 23-19, partly because Sorrentine had gone 1-of-8 from 3-point range. He looked at Jensen, and they both laughed as they recalled their pregame chat. “Let’s see what we got,” Sorrentine said.

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The second half was close the whole way. The Orange had trouble containing Vermont’s leading scorer, 6-9 senior forward Taylor Coppenrath, who finished with 16 points and three steals. Senior forward Germain Mopa Njila, who scored a career-high 20 points to go along with nine rebounds, five assists and four steals, appeared to have scored the game-winning bucket with three seconds to play in regulation, but the official ruled that he had stepped out of bounds. To overtime, the teams went.

They stayed close for the first four minutes of the extra session, inching toward the pivotal moment. Vermont led 56-55 at the 1:30 mark, when Sorrentine caught the ball from a teammate with 24 seconds remaining on the shot clock. Brennan had called for a play in which Sorrentine was supposed to pass the ball, run himself off a flare screen and then get it back. Because he was going to take the final shot anyway, Sorrentine decided there was no point in passing.

He stood with his feet still on the halfcourt logo, absent-mindedly dribbling the ball, twice going between his legs. A teammate approached with his hands up, but Sorrentine waved him off. Sorrentine locked his eyes on the two defenders at the top of the Syracuse zone. His plan was to let the shot clock tick down until there was one second left, but as soon as he saw the guards step his way, Sorrentino took a rhythm dribble, bent his knees and let fly with a high-arcing set shot.

When it swished, Johnson let loose the words that still live on. Oooooh, my goodness! Sorrentine hit that one … from the parking lot! Brennan leaped from the bench, raised his arms and pumped his fists. There was still a minute left, but the 59-55 cushion was just enough for the Catamounts to close out a 60-57 win.

All these years later, Boeheim insists he is not making excuses, and he gives Vermont full credit. He simply points out what he remembers — namely, that his team had been gassed by that dash through the Big East tournament. He points as evidence the Orange’s season-high 24 turnovers. “We never did anything the entire game,” Boeheim says. “It wasn’t like we had a bad point or a bad stretch. We were just bad, from the very start to the very end.”

Brennan half-jokingly refers to Sorrentine’s dagger as “one of the worst shots in the history of college basketball,” but Sorrentine, who grew up in Pawtucket, R.I., as the son of a longtime high school basketball coach, remembers feeling serene in that moment. “It’s one of those things you dream about,” he says. “I don’t know if kids play outside anymore, but I did, a lot. I played in playgrounds and parks and on my driveway. You practice those shots. I mean, I lived in the gym. I wasn’t scared. If I had missed it and we lost, I was OK with that. I knew I had put the work in.”

As the final seconds ticked off the clock in Worcester, Bucknell and Kansas were getting ready to tip off some 1,600 miles away in Oklahoma City. As Flannery went into the locker room for a pregame chat, he got wind of Vermont’s win. He was happy for his good friend Brennan, but he was also a little remiss that the Catamounts had stolen his team’s thunder. “It was almost like, oh shoot, we wanted to be the team to pull the big upset,” Flannery says. “But it did add to my excitement, just to know that this stuff really does happen.”

There was no reason to believe Bucknell could pull off the same feat. Kansas had not fallen in the opening round since 1978, and KU’s four seniors had made two two Final Four appearances. Bucknell could not match that pedigree, but it did have a history extending all the way back to 1896, tying it with Yale and Minnesota as the nation’s oldest Division I programs. That had to count for something, right?

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Kansas won 20 of its first 21 games and was 10-0 in the Big 12, but injuries, illness and fatigue conspired to make the Jayhawks lose four of their last six games in the regular season. They then lost to Oklahoma State in the semifinals of the conference tournament. Moreover, the team’s second-leading scorer, 6-4 senior guard Keith Langford, had been hit by an ankle injury. Self assumed Langford would not be able to play against Bucknell, but Langford surprised him by telling the media the day before that he was good to go. “I’m thinking, OK, we’re gonna play a guy who hasn’t practiced in two weeks?” Self recalls. “He could barely move.” Self was also concerned that his 6-5 sophomore guard, J.R. Giddens, was going to be distracted by playing in his hometown. Heck, Self himself grew up in Oklahoma City. He was going to have a lot of friends and family on hand.

Unlike Vermont, Bucknell was not playing within driving distance of campus. The school in Lewisburg, Pa., was on spring break, and the band didn’t bother making the trip. Northern Iowa’s band agreed to pitch in. Bucknell’s band director faxed some sheet music and shipped a box of orange Bucknell T-shirts so the band members would be properly attired.

Heading into the game, Flannery believed his team would benefit from an unconventional defense, which switched often from match-up zone to man-to-man, sometimes within the same possession. “When you’re trying to pull off an upset, you have to do something to keep the other guys off-balance,” he says. It worked as Bucknell led built a seven-point first-half lead. Kansas, however, closed on a 10-0 run and took a 31-28 lead into intermission.

The game remained taut. As is often the case, all the non-Kansas fans in the arena, including the Wisconsin players, who were awaiting the winner, stood and cheered for the Bison. As the minutes ticked away, Flannery noticed his players gaining confidence. “You could see them really starting to believe,” he says. “There was a whole different bounce in their step in that second half.”

Bucknell guard Charles Lee was whistled for an intentional foul when he grabbed KU’s Michael Lee’s jersey from behind on a fast break. Lee hit both free throws and Kansas had the ball trailing 62-61 with 53.7 seconds remaining. A pair of Langford free throws put the Jayhawks up, 63-62.

The game was decided not by a dramatic 3 but rather an unconventional 2 from the hands of Bucknell 6-11 sophomore center Chris McNaughton, who banked in a hook shot in the paint to stake the Bison to a 64-63 lead with 10.5 seconds to play. Langford took the ensuing inbounds pass, sprinted upcourt and missed a pullup jumper from eight feet. Bucknell freshman guard John Griffin rebounded the ball in traffic and was fouled. That boded well for the Bison becausee Griffin was an 84.6 percent free-throw shooter, but he had not tried a free throw all night, and he missed the front end of a one-and-one. Kansas called timeout to set up a final play.

When Self looks back on McNaughton’s bucket, he is reminded of a similar bank shot that Kentucky guard Sean Woods hit in the final seconds of overtime in the epic 1992 East Regional final against Duke. That’s fitting because the play Self drew up looked very much like the play Duke used to win that game. The part of Grant Hill was played by Michael Lee, who threw a three-quarter-court pass to Wayne Simien. Alas, Simien was no Christian Laettner. His turnaround jumper from the foul line clanked off the front rim. Bucknell’s place in history was secured.

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The Bison won the game with their defense. Kansas missed its last 10 field goal attempts. Its final 14 points came from the foul line. “The bottom line is in that particular game, those were two evenly matched teams,” Self says. “I’m not going to say it wasn’t an upset, but they controlled the game.”

Bucknell became the first No. 14 seed to win an NCAA Tournament game since Weber State beat North Carolina in 1999. Flannery did his CBS postgame interview on the court and then went into the locker room, where his players were waiting. As he started talking about Wisconsin, the players shot him quizzical looks. He caught himself and allowed everyone some time for jubilation. “The kids were looking at me cross-eyed, like, are you kidding me?” he recalls. “That’s just the way you’re conditioned as a coach. You stay in the moment, and you want to keep it going.”

The triumphant underdogs didn’t stay in the tourney for long. Vermont lost its second-round game to fifth-seeded Michigan State, 72-61. Bucknell lost to the sixth-seeded Badgers, 71-62.

At season’s end, the five Vermont seniors graduated, and Brennan rode into the sunset, which in his case meant a short-lived gig with ESPN. Bucknell, on the other hand, returned most of its squad and put together the best season in program history, going 27-5, entering the AP Top 25 in mid-February and earning a No. 9 seed in the 2006 NCAA Tournament, where the Bison won their first-round game over Arkansas to much less fanfare.

Alas, Flannery could never overcome the stress issues that plagued him. He thought things would get better after his gall bladder was removed. He visited with a sports psychologist. Nothing worked. When the university president offered him a development job in 2008, Flannery jumped at the chance. “Coaches want to control things they can’t control, and it gets you in a bad spot,” he says. “Ninety percent of the job was great, but I could never find a way to relax. One of my sons, who’s a jazz musician, didn’t want to come near the bench. I was losing my family, but now we couldn’t be happier. Bucknell has really been wonderful to me.”

The memory is not so wonderful for the coaches who were on the wrong end of history, but time offers perspective. “If you play in enough NCAA Tournaments, you’re going to get upset sometimes,” Boeheim says. “That’s just the way it works.” Boeheim points out that Syracuse’s loss opened a path for Michigan State, which went to the Final Four. In 2016, Syracuse got to face 15th-seeded Middle Tennessee in the second round because the Blue Raiders had scored a shocking first-round upset over … Michigan State. The Orange then played their way to the Final Four. Thus do all NCAA tourney storylines come full circle.

Self says that during the off-season that followed, he couldn’t eat a meal or swing a golf club without thinking about the loss. A golf trip to Las Vegas with his closest friends was supposed to help, except his buddies arranged to have every beverage cart on the course decorated in Bucknell colors. “And these are the guys that will speak at my funeral,” Self cracks.

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When Flannery stopped by the Kansas campus on a work trip last year, Self graciously invited him to watch practice, then introduced him to a group of KU boosters as the guy who gave him “the worst night of my life.” Self understands the special place this game has in the memory of fans and viewers. “You feel awful for yourself from a competitive standpoint, but you’re actually happy for them too,” he says. “I can appreciate the effort they made to win that game.”

That took some time, however. When Self got home the day after the game, he sat his wife and two children on a bed and let them know that they might hear some unpleasant things about their dad in school over the coming days. “You gotta be tough,” he told them. “You gotta let things roll off your back.” Boeheim was likewise all but impossible to cheer up in the days that followed. “You just go home and mope around,” he says. “That’s all you can do.”

Boeheim was still feeling mopey when he went to the Final Four in St. Louis, where he was attending the National Association of Basketball Coaches’ annual convention. At one point Boeheim stepped into a hotel elevator and found himself alone with Self. The two exchanged sad, knowing looks and rode up several floors without saying a word.

Finally, Self broke the awkward silence. “You know,” he said with a grin, “I bet Bucknell could beat the crap out of Vermont.”

(Top photo of Vermont’s T.J. Sorrentine: John Dunn / Sporting News via Getty Images)