CHARLOTTE, N.C. _ Of all Zion Williamson's memorable feats throughout the past several months _ the dunks, the blocked shots, the highly-disseminated destruction of a particular piece of Nike footwear _ perhaps the most significant happened at the ACC tournament: through his mere presence, Williamson energized the Thursday late game, and made it appointment viewing.
Such a thing is no small task. Most years, the Thursday late game, the tournament's final quarterfinal, looks and feels anticlimactic. It always begins around 9:30 p.m., after a long and full day of basketball, and more often than not it plays out before thousands of empty seats.
The best finish of the 2011 ACC tournament came in that same game in the same round, when Virginia Tech and Florida State dragged on late into the night before Derwin Kitchen's buzzer-beater for the Seminoles was waved off after a replay review. The announced attendance that night was more than 23,000, and perhaps one-tenth of it remained for the end of the Hokies' victory. Seated on the baseline, even ACC Commissioner John Swofford looked a little dazed in the second half, and he was far from alone.
That's how the final second-round and quarterfinal games usually are: tired crowds, empty seats, resting eyes. Which leads to Thursday, which was none of that. Williamson, the Duke freshman, was playing in his first game since Feb. 20, and the blown-shoe-heard-round-the-world.
Duke's eventual victory over Syracuse at the end of a long day became the main event instead of the afterthought, with the usual _ meaning completely unusual, for a college basketball player _ amount of attention on Williamson from the moment he left the locker room, to the court and back again, where a fleet of cameras and microphones awaited.
Asked recently if he could recall witnessing another player receive the kind of attention that Williamson has, Swofford, who has been the ACC's commissioner since 1997, offered simple insight: "No, I haven't," he said.
"He's a very unique player," he said. "We're in a social-media time that is relatively new. When you combine those two things, you get Zion.
Williamson is, at once, both a freshman college basketball player who is going through the kind of growth _ mental and emotional, especially _ that many college freshman experience; and yet he is also a national phenomenon: a spectacle whose fame has made his last name somewhat obsolete. Indeed, Williamson these days is simply "Zion," and living life as Zion means living in the fishbowl _ every eye and iPhone focused on him.
