Six Years Later, My Retelling of Virginia's 2019 National Championship Victory

Matt Newton | Apr 8, 2025

Brace Hemmelgarn-Imagn Images

By now, you've probably heard this story retold a million times.

With a three-point lead in the waning moments of the title game, Texas Tech mistakenly overhelps on Ty Jerome's dribble drive and he makes the pass to De'Andre Hunter, who sinks the corner three to tie the game. Braxton Key blocks a jump shot from Jarrett Culver to send the game to overtime. Hunter makes another big three to put UVA ahead, the Cavaliers put their elite defense on display with a series of big stops and make a bunch of clutch free throws, and then Key slams home the dunk while Bill Raftery exclaims, "say goodnight!"

The final moments of one of the best redemption stories in sports history.

In my time covering Virginia athletics, I've recounted UVA's epic run to the 2019 National Championship Game many times. But on this site, I've never taken the time to share my personal experience of that unforgettable series of games in late March and early April of 2019.

So today, on the sixth anniversary of Virginia capturing its first-ever national title, and the first anniversary without Tony Bennett at the helm of the program, I thought it'd be a good time to offer my perspective on one of the best moments of my life.

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I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, but I have been a Virginia sports fan my entire life thanks to my parents, who both attended the University of Virginia and were married at the UVA Chapel in 1990. Our family took many trips down to Charlottesville for football games and other sporting events in my childhood, fostering my love for the school that would eventually become my home and my passion for sports that eventually directed me to my first real job after I graduated.

Midway through my first year at UVA, I discovered the student-run digital media organization called WUVA. I joined up, hoping to refine my skills as a video editor. Instead, I found a calling that ended up occupying most of my time as an undergrad: producing videos covering the many great Virginia sports teams. By the start of 2019, I had been named the sports director at WUVA, and what a time for me to start that job.

Over the next several months, I covered the national championship victories for the Virginia men's basketball and men's lacrosse teams, did a one-on-one interview with Tony Bennett in the following summer that remains my proudest achievement as a sports journalist, and covered Virginia's first victory over Virginia Tech in football in 15 years, building a resume that helped me land this job running the Virginia Cavaliers On SI site for Sports Illustrated.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It was important that I give a little bit of detail about what was going on for me at the time that Virginia completed what Jim Nantz called "the all-time turnaround title." But now, back to the story.

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When Virginia arrived at the 2019 NCAA Tournament, once again as a No. 1 seed, I must admit that I let the superstitious side of myself get a little bit out of hand. You see, I was convinced that I was cursed. At that point, I had been to three UVA postseason sporting events in person and was a perfectly terrible 0-3 in those games.

When I was 11, I attended the national semifinals of the 2010 NCAA Men's Lacrosse Championship in Baltimore and saw what is still considered one of the greatest lacrosse games of all time, a 14-13 loss for Virginia at the hands of Duke. The following year, I stayed home while Steele Stanwick and the Cavaliers won it all.

In December of 2017, in the midst of winter break in my first year at UVA, I attended the Military Bowl between Virginia and Navy in Annapolis (with all respect to the military academies, it's still wildly unfair that UVA was playing a true road game for its bowl game). I don't remember the exact temperature, but it was damn cold. Joe Reed ran the opening kickoff back for a touchdown and I was temporarily feeling pretty warm. But the Cavaliers didn't score again after that and suffered a 49-7 loss. The following year, I stayed home while Virginia demolished South Carolina 28-0 in the Belk Bowl in Charlotte.

I think you might be able to guess where this is headed.

A few months later, a couple of friends and I made the 270-mile journey down to the Spectrum Center in Charlotte to see the No. 1 overall seed Virginia Cavaliers play their first round game against the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. De'Andre Hunter's injury had tempered my expectations of winning the national title that year, but I still couldn't pass up the chance to see my team, who I had watched every second of every game all season long, play in the NCAA Tournament, especially when the stars seemed to align for it. I had family living just outside Charlotte at the time, providing us with free lodging, my friend was able to borrow his sister's car, and the game was scheduled for Friday night, so we didn't even have to miss class.

Like I said, it was as if the universe was telling me to attend the game.

I still have my ticket stub (yes, a real printed out ticket) from that nightmarish event, a game immortalized in college basketball history.

0-3 in postseason games. And that third one was a doozy.

So, while there were some logistical complications regarding my physical attendance at any of Virginia's NCAA Tournament games in 2019, and especially in the Final Four in Minneapolis, I maintain to this day that by far and away the biggest reason that I could not and would not attend those games was because I knew the Hoos wouldn't win if I did.

Two of my roommates made the trip to Minneapolis, including one of those friends that went to UMBC with me the year before. But I stayed home and watched from the same exact spot on the couch in the living room of my duplex near Jefferson Park Avenue and wore the same exact UVA T-shirt for each of Virginia's six NCAA Tournament games. And no, I did not wash the shirt between games.

Hey, I'm just doing my part, right?

After every game, I'd make the short walk across the street where the WUVA studio was conveniently located and I'd produce a video recapping the game and talking about what was next for the Hoos. It was work, but it was the most enjoyable work I had ever done in my life, covering a team I loved more than almost anything going on a redemption tour for the ages. And that was my life for those three weeks in late March and early April 2019.

When Virginia outlasted Oregon in the Sweet Sixteen in that late-night game that tipped off at 10:30pm and ended well past midnight Eastern time, I walked across the street to WUVA when the game was done and pumped out another video.

When Kihei Clark found Mamadi Diakite to tie the game against Purdue, I leapt up from my spot on the couch, ran around like a crazy person, settled back in to watch UVA win in overtime, and then walked across the street to WUVA to make another video.

Then came the weekend of the Final Four. With all of my friends that I usually watched the games with either headed to Minneapolis or otherwise engaged, I was left to watch Virginia-Auburn alone. When the Tigers went on their 14-0 run to take a 61-57 lead with 17 seconds left, I was certain that UVA's bounce back story was going to end with "only" a Final Four appearance and I made my peace with that.

Then, Kyle Guy made a big three, something else happened that we don't need to talk about, and then I swear Guy was about to make another three that would have won the game at the buzzer had he not been fouled. Instead, he sunk the three clutchest free throws you'll ever see and Virginia's miraculous run continued. I gave my parents a quick phone call to discuss the ending and then walked across the street to WUVA to make another video.

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For weeks, I had known that there was a midterm exam scheduled in my Oceanography class for the Tuesday immediately following the National Championship Game. I tried, unsuccessfully, to study in advance. By the time that Monday came around, I was woefully unprepared for the exam that, much to my chagrin, was proctored as scheduled the next day despite being less than 12 hours after the confetti fell on the Cavaliers at U.S. Bank Stadium. Oceanography is not a difficult class, but it's a great deal of information that must be learned or memorized and I just found myself struggling to stay focused for some reason.

And so, after Texas Tech overhelped on a dribble drive up three and Jerome made the pass and Hunter made the shot and Key blocked Culver and Hunter hit another three and UVA made stop after stop and then Key said "goodnight" to the Red Raiders, my night was only just beginning. And, unfortunately for me, not in the same way as the rest of my fellow UVA students who descended upon the Lawn and the Corner to celebrate that night.

I allowed myself to celebrate for a few minutes with my friends in my house - finally able to leave that solitary spot on the couch as it had served its purpose - and then I walked across the street to make one of my favorite videos ever. It was after 3am by the time I published the video and left the studio. I then drove over to Clemons Library, where I spent the next few hours trying, desperately but again rather unsuccessfully, to force random facts about the world's oceans into my brain that wanted nothing more than to think about Virginia basketball... or sleep.

Unsurprisingly, my all-nighter was in vain. I ended up bombing the midterm anyway.

In hindsight, I should have just taken the L on the exam and/or waited until the next day to make my National Championship recap video. But I was 20 years old and stupid and stubborn.

Even now, six years later, I don't really have any regrets about how I handled that night. My experience of Virginia winning the national title was uniquely me. I knew how special that moment was and it was important to me that I experienced it both as a fan and as a fledgling sports journalist. To me, that was well worth the cost of one night of sleep and a failed exam.

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As a fan, seeing my favorite sports team reach the mountaintop and win the championship was incredible. But as followers of UVA basketball know, the context of that title victory, both for what preceded it and what has since followed it, makes it truly, truly special.

Everyone talks about the UMBC loss and how it fueled the championship run. Tony Bennett himself made it the theme of the season - "If you learn to use it right, the adversity, it will buy you a ticket to a place you couldn't have gone any other way." But the foundational seasons of the Bennett era are just as important. Because it wasn't just the UMBC upset. The losses to Michigan State in 2014 and 2015 and the collapse against Syracuse in 2016 (a defeat which, I agree with many Virginia fans in saying, is more painful than the UMBC loss - and that's coming from someone who was in the building for the latter).

Those losses and the entire history of Virginia basketball had convinced me, and I'm sure many other UVA fans, that what we were hoping for was simply impossible. Even with the heights the program had reached under Tony Bennett, it seemed we would only ever knock on the door.

But Tony was right. Joy, in fact, came in the morning.

Then there's what has happened since then.

Maybe some of us fooled ourselves into thinking a dynasty was about to begin in Charlottesville. But with the chaos of the NCAA Tournament, even the greatest teams struggle to win it all. It was always unlikely that Virginia was going to win another national title anytime soon.

And had Virginia came up short against Purdue or Auburn or Texas Tech and had some or all of the Big Three of Kyle Guy, Ty Jerome, and De'Andre Hunter decided to come back for another year, that group would have only joined the list of devastated 2019-2020 teams that felt they had what it takes to win it all, only to be denied the chance to even try by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Virginia had some good teams in the post-national championship era. Sam Hauser, Trey Murphy III, and Jay Huff headlined one of UVA's most offensively talented teams ever in 2020-2021, but an untimely COVID-19 case on the team directly led to another disappointing first round upset. In my first year covering Virginia professionally as part of the Sports Illustrated network, the Cavaliers took a big step back and played in the NIT. They had a good team in 2022-2023, but again went down in the first round as Kihei Clark bookended his career with similarly unforgettable, but diametrically opposed passes in the NCAA Tournament. UVA was one of the last teams in the field of 68 in 2023-2024 and was blown out in a play-in game that nobody knew was Tony Bennett's final game coaching at Virginia.

With what we know now about what happened in the years post-2019, the stakes seem even greater in retrospect. It wasn't just a humiliated team completing a redemption story. It was Virginia's best, and as it turns out, last chance (at least under Tony Bennett) at winning a national championship.

And they didn't miss it.

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The Tony Bennett era of Virginia basketball changed my life. Admittedly, I was 10 years old when he was hired and 25 when he announced his retirement, so naturally there were going to be some significant life changes in that time. But rooting for UVA men's basketball was a formative part of my upbringing and became part of my identity and it still is. In many ways, the passion I discovered for sports media and journalism came directly from my passion for Virginia basketball. I will forever be grateful for the countless ways following this program has changed my life and I will always cherish these memories, especially those unforgettable moments in late March and early April of 2019.