HOUSTON — The time of Lamont Butler’s life began with his feet off the ground, which gave him a good view of the delirium he’d caused. Lifted high in a bear hug, he could see thousands of San Diego State fans up for grabs at NRG Stadium, and he screamed right along with them. The rest of it went about how these things go: teammates swallowing him whole, one of them fanning him with a jersey during an interview on national television, another squirting water on the top of his head, various people grabbing at him to bring him somewhere else to relive an enchanted moment.
We’ll see what Butler did over and over now, connecting on a jumper with a fraction of a second left in a Final Four game, giving his team a chance to play for a national championship. San Diego State 72, Florida Atlantic 71, by way of a 6-foot-2 guard’s pull-up at the final horn. A Saturday night snagged in a dreamcatcher. “For him to hit that shot,” backcourt mate Darrion Trammell said in a still-crackling locker room, “he’s going to be a legend forever.”
Still, the moments are moments but almost always an accumulation, too. The last frame on the reel. Butler stood in the back corner of that locker room a few minutes after Trammell declared him a new Aztec icon and couldn’t get past “crazy” a half-dozen times in his attempts to describe the evening’s events. “This is like a dream come true,” he said. He didn’t spend any time at home last summer, choosing to stay in San Diego to build out a midrange game. He felt the burden of a critical turnover in a Maui Invitational loss before burying himself in the work aimed at finding something like redemption, at some future point. He endured the unthinkable loss of maybe his biggest fan, the one who always somehow found her way to the front row of his games, and he decided he’d do what he does to make her happy.
All eyes will be on what happened after Butler received a pass with less than eight seconds left against Florida Atlantic, when what happened was the residue of everything that came before. “He’s been through so much,” Aztecs guard Matt Bradley said. “He’s a better man than me. I don’t know if I’d be able to keep going like he’s been going for us, being a leader on this team. He’s the backbone. He’s somebody that we look up to. He’s bounced back stronger than anybody I’ve ever seen.”
Instead of making the 100-mile trip north to Moreno Valley, Calif., and home last summer, Butler immersed himself in self-improvement on campus. He’d taken a total of 10 jump shots inside the 3-point arc in 2021-22, per Synergy Sports. He’d made one. His 30.1 percent efficiency from long range didn’t sparkle, either, all of which led a player who broke Reggie Miller’s scoring record at his high school to reevaluate what kind of repertoire he was bringing to bear nightly. “To get a midrange game was big for me in the summer,” Butler said Saturday night. He focused not on volume but on how many shots in a row he could hit — 10 straight, 15 straight — in an effort to build consistency. The one-dribble pull-up that put Florida Atlantic away? Butler didn’t have a count on how many of those he hoisted away from the spotlight just a few months ago. All he knows is there were a lot of them.
“I’ve seen Lamont hit that shot a thousand times,” forward Jaedon LeDee said. “A million times.”
The answer was the same after a late turnover in the Maui Invitational against Arkansas, when Butler coughed up the ball while getting double-teamed at the end of regulation, giving the Razorbacks a path to tie the score and eventually win in overtime. A gaffe in a November multi-team event should be fairly forgettable. It was not. As recently as one day before the national semifinal game, Butler revisited that game, and how he had to remind himself that one mistake and one six-second span didn’t define who he was. “What people don’t understand is, Lamont took that so hard,” his father, Lamont Sr., said Saturday night. “He didn’t show it on the outside, but he felt he let the team down. He said, ‘Dad, I’m going to get to work. And watch.’”
He’d come into the Final Four with the lowest turnover rate (18.5 percent) and highest assist rate (25.1 percent) of his three seasons at San Diego State, and along the way broke even with basketball karma: Nearly three months to the day of the Arkansas loss, Butler hit a buzzer-beating game-winner at New Mexico.
“That,” he noted Saturday, “has no comparison to this.”
This was something Asasha Hall would have loved to see. She was a proud older sister. It is unclear if there would have been enough security in NRG Stadium to keep her from storming the court after little brother’s big shot. “Loudest in the gym,” is how Lamont Butler remembered her Saturday. “She was funny. Just great.” That a man named Koron LeKeith Lowe allegedly pulled a gun in the early hours of Jan. 25, 2022, during a domestic dispute and fired, and police found Hall fatally wounded when they arrived on the scene, never will be comprehended. The voice Butler grew accustomed to hearing in the front row is now just an echo.
But he does still hear it. “I miss her,” Butler said, “but I’m doing everything I can to make her happy.”
And all of it crescendoed Saturday night, in a glorious blur.
A missed Florida Atlantic layup with 8.8 seconds left. A San Diego State rebound. No timeout. A kick ahead to Butler, whose initial plan was to get downhill and get to the rim. A redirect from the Owls’ Nick Boyd, who stayed in front of Butler and jammed him up in the corner. A right foot that was less than an inch away from touching the baseline paint as Butler changed direction. Then an in-and-out dribble. Then the pull-up. The same shot Butler crafted all summer. The same go-to he uses during one-on-one games with his teammates.
“For a second, I was like, is he going to get it off?” Aztecs guard Adam Seiko said. “And he just let it go.”
“It was nothing new to him,” Trammell said. “He wasn’t scared of the moment. He got right to his spot and he does what he does.”
“I told him in Albuquerque to get to the rim, too, and he shot a pull-up 3 and made it,” San Diego State coach Brian Dutcher said. “I’ll quit telling him what to do and just say: ‘Lamont, you get the ball. And I’ll live with whatever happens.’”
“I got to a shot I’m comfortable with,” Butler said. “It felt good leaving my hands. Felt good the whole way. And I’m glad.”
Not long after extricating himself from his teammates, Butler crossed the raised floor at NRG Stadium, toward the fans waving towels thrown to them by San Diego State’s student managers, toward all the people still in thrall over a moment that was somehow both beyond belief and a long time coming.
Butler flexed a little, before making another statement.
“One more!” he shouted.
That won’t come any easier on Monday night against UConn, but since when do Lamont Butler and San Diego State do easy all that well, anyway? This moment alone was at once a product of tragedy and diligence and failure and redemption. A mosaic of every difficult thing that came before it.
It’s like Lamont Butler’s father told him in those dark hours after a November disappointment in paradise: Life isn’t a cakewalk, but hard work pays off. It’s just a matter of when.
(Top photo: Jamie Schwaberow / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
