NCAA BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT : Kansas Dreamers Click Heels and Get a Trip to Kansas City, 71-58

PONTIAC, Mich. — At the Kan-Kan game Sunday, the winner was Kansas. Having already played Kansas State three times this season and lost twice, the Jayhawks did everything right this time, winning, 71-58, winning the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. Midwest Regional, and winning their second trip to the Final Four in three years.

Kansas will play Duke in Saturday’s semifinals at Kansas City, Mo., just as it played Duke in the 1986 semifinals at Dallas--losing, 71-67--and just as it did on Feb. 12 of this year at Lawrence, Kan.--losing in overtime, 74-70.

Advice to Duke? Take nothing for granted.

After beating Kansas twice before, by 11 points in the Jayhawks’ gym and by 15 points in the Big Eight tournament at Kansas City, there was every reason to expect Kansas State to do it again Sunday at the Pontiac Silverdome, where 31,632 showed up to watch a couple of college teams from 750 miles away.

Being favored meant feeling pressure, Kansas Coach Larry Brown reasoned. “They were supposed to beat us,” he said of Kansas State. “I think they were convinced they could beat us.”

What he is counting on is Duke feeling exactly the same way.

Kansas (25-11) is getting a lot of underestimated mileage. This club is better than it looks. It is better than its record. It is better than Brown tells everybody it is. It is better than the one-man team it is supposed to be, since senior forward Danny Manning--”the greatest college player I’ve ever been associated with,” Brown called him--is expected to be the No. 1 pick in the next National Basketball Assn. draft.

That was no one-man team that took K-State apart in Sunday’s second half, 44-29.

Sure, Manning had his game-high 20 points, but the stars of the show for the Jayhawks were the guys around him. Guys such as junior guard Milt Newton, who had one of his best days ever: 18 points, 9 rebounds, 7 assists. It was Newton who also put a stopper on scoring machine Mitch Richmond of the Wildcats, limiting him to 11 points on 4-of-14 shooting, and forcing him into 6 turnovers.

Then there was Scooter Barry, a reserve guard and son of NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry, who outscored everybody on the opposing team except long-range bomber William Scott, Kansas State’s leader with 18 points.

Barry, a 6-foot 3 1/2-inch junior who had scored in double figures only once in his college career, came to his teammates’ rescue after their slow start with 15 points and 5 rebounds. Barry’s 22-foot shot from the wing, with two seconds remaining in the first half, was worth three points, and pulled Kansas to within 29-27 at halftime.

The game went back and forth, tied at 6, 12 and 18, before Kansas State opened its largest lead, 27-22. Kansas had received no points from its starting guards in the half, and none from any guard until Barry’s chip-off-the-old-block shot from afar.

“We got a lot of unexpected good things from our players,” Brown said. “We know what Danny’s gonna do, but Milt (Newton) gets 7 assists, when he hasn’t had 7 assists in his life, and Scooter gets 15 points, when he’s spent his entire career being reluctant to shoot. So many unlikely kids helped us, kids I was either too reluctant or too dumb to play earlier.”

Still another unlikely hero was Keith Harris, the 6-5 1/2 sophomore forward from Santa Monica, who made one of the game’s biggest plays near the start of the second half. Ninety seconds after he entered the game in place of starter Chris Piper, the youngest sophomore in the Big Eight--Harris turned 19 on Saturday--stole the ball and stuffed it, giving the Jayhawks their first lead of the half at 43-42.

It was a lead they never lost.

Already pretty much in control of things, 57-52, with 3:15 to play, Kansas rattled off eight straight points to put it away. It happened the minute Barry returned to the game. Newton rebounded a missed free throw and scored, Barry cut down the lane and scored on a perfect Newton feed, Barry bagged two free throws and Kevin Pritchard jammed on a two-on-one break.

It was 65-52, and the coach was leaping into his assistants’ arms.

Alvin Gentry, one of his aides, put Brown into a loving headlock and reminded him that at one point this team had a record of 12-8 and was, as Brown put it later, “thinking maybe we could host a game in the NIT.” Instead, this team is one of four remaining contenders for the national championship.

“You get highs and lows as a coach, and a lot of people know lows, but I don’t think many people have experienced what I’m experiencing right now,” Brown said.

It was a high on the order of 1980, when Brown’s UCLA team went all the way to the national title game before ending up with a record of 22-10.

“This parallels the UCLA experience,” Brown said. “Our (Kansas) team two years ago, we were good enough that we would have been disappointed at anything less than a Final Four appearance. This team and that UCLA team, I’ve never been through anything like this.”

Brown loves these Kansas kids so much that he hugged every one of them as they came out of the game in the final minute, screaming: “Yeah! Yeah!” The coach was so excited that when he pushed sophomore guard Jeff Gueldner toward the scorer’s table as a substitute with 29 seconds left, he accidentally knocked him to the floor.

Kansas State (25-9) hoped to enjoy such a celebration, but with Richmond and Scott sinking only 10 of 29 shots, no way. The Wildcats also got just two points out of center Ron Meyer, and 11 from the entire bench.

When Richmond scored 35 and 21 points previously against Kansas, Kansas State won, even ending KU’s 55-game home winning streak. In the two K-State losses, Richmond scored 11 each time.

One of the country’s best players, Richmond has felt unknown and unappreciated, saying just Saturday that he has even seen his name reported in newspapers as “Rich Mitchmond.” Well, the season ended with no more respect. He made the Midwest all-tournament team, but was listed as: “Milt Richmond.”

Kansas and Kansas State “are not supposed to like each other,” as KU’s Gueldner said, but it is actually a love-hate relationship. Gov. Mike Hayden, a Kansas State graduate, flew to Michigan for Sunday’s game, but stayed impartial because most of his family members attended Kansas.

Lon Kruger, the K-State coach, said Kansas had his every good wish for the Final Four, as did the other Big Eight team that will be there.

“We want Oklahoma and Kansas to meet in the finals,” Kruger said. “We’d be tickled to death.”

How Kansas got so far, nobody knows. Including the coach. Brown lost a talented transfer student in October who was ruled ineligible because his credits didn’t transfer properly. He redshirted a 6-10 senior who had fallen behind on his studies. He lost starting forward Piper for the start of the season with knee and groin injuries. Another player got a medical redshirt to realign his jaw and correct a breathing problem.

On Dec. 30, starting forward Archie Marshall suffered season-ending knee damage. On Jan. 13, starting center Marvin Branch was ruled academically ineligible. On Feb. 3, freshman center Mike Masucci, making his first start, suffered a concussion. On Feb. 3, starting Gueldner sprained his left ankle, going out for five games.

On March 7, junior guard Otis Livingston was suspended for disciplinary reasons. On March 11, starting guard Pritchard sprained a ligament and missed the conference tournament loss to Kansas State. On March 17, Masucci also was suspended for disciplinary reasons.

Brown thought he was finished. He thought he was totally undermanned, except for Manning.

“I have the greatest college player I’ve been associated with. He’s everything that college athletics are about,” Brown said. “I thought I didn’t have enough left to go with him, but I had the right players there all the time.

“I was just too dumb to recognize their talents.”

He wasn’t the only one.