Repost: Season 73 Championship: The Big Show (Upper A)

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Season 73 Championship: The Big Show (Upper A)

date posted: 2010-10-02 08:42:31
Enzo Flojo

Out of shape?

Try out of this world.

And that three pointer? Out of the blue, and into Ateneo sports history.

In what will be remembered in the same breath as Gec Chia’s 2002 game winner, Larry Fonacier’s twin blocks on Mac Cardona, and Doug Kramer’s 2006 miracle stab, jumbo-sized junior Ryan Buenafe unleashed a hero-or-zero bomb. He apparently had made only one three prior to that shot, but it doesn’t really matter how many you make, or miss, as long as you hit the one when it counts the most.

And boy did he hit it.

Photo by Aaron Vicencio

By hitting the biggest shot in the biggest show, Ryan Buenafe is no longer big in just the literal sense. He undoubtedly saved his most magnificent performance of the season for the championship-clinching clash, but awesome though he was, his teammates stepped up big as well.

Buenafe’s batchmates, Nico Salva and Justin Chua, along with Frank Golla, held their own against FEU’s trees. Kirk Long and Eric Salamat, despite finishing with underwhelming numbers, were steady. But, aside from Buenafe, the guy who really played big was the diminutive Emman Monfort.

His 10 points didn’t exactly light up the score sheet, but his hustle and grit prevented league MVP RR Garcia from getting anything going. If Buenafe was the big shot who lifted Ateneo’s offense, then Monfort was the big bug that devastated FEU’s Game 2 mainframe.

And thanks to our hard-court heroes, we’ll burn some wood for the third straight year.

This is a rare three-peat made even sweeter by the fact that there was no clear-cut single superstar who led the team in every game. Instead of an individual lifting the team, it was the team lifting the team.

Who would step up on any given night? Nobody knew.

The certainty lay not in who would have the hot hand, but in the reality that a hot hand would be there regardless of whose name was printed on the back of the jersey. Justin Chua had his magnificent moments. So did Nico Salva and Arthur Dela Cruz. Kirk Long, Eric Salamat, and Emman Monfort had their own monster games. Even farther-down-the-bench players like Jason Escueta, Chris De Chavez and Juami Tiongson lit up the scoreboard in a game or two. There was no Blue Eagle in the Mythical Five, but perhaps that’s because the team was bigger, was more mythical, than the sum of its parts.

At the end of the day, at the end of the season, ours was the true Mythical Team, and we have the hardware to prove it.

Perhaps in many ways, the preseason doubters got it right. We finished with four losses – more losses than from the past two seasons combined. We lost some big leads with alarming regularity. We had no MVP. We were swept by FEU in both elimination rounds. We were supposed to be ripe for the taking.

But in the biggest show, on the biggest stage, with the biggest prize at stake?

That’s where the doubters got it all wrong. In a time when all they looked at were lineups, stat sheets, standings, and individual awards, they forgot to look inside the one place where real heroes are made – the heart of a champion.

Photo by Aaron Vicencio

And that championship heart floated to the surface at the most critical time.

That heroic heart made the big play when it counted the most.

At the 23.8 second mark, with just 5 ticks left in the shot clock, the hero rose up, took the big shot, and made it.

One BIG Fight!