The view from Section V2, Row 4: Ty Jerome’s father (deep breath) exults in Cavs’ miracle victory

MINNEAPOLIS — His hands balled in fists and arms over his head, Mark Jerome watched as Kyle Guy stepped to the line with nothing less than the difference between an empty trip to the Final Four and a shot at a national championship game appearance on the line, and declared, “I’m not looking.’’ Sitting in front of him, Kyle’s father, Joe, and stepfather, Tim Fitzgerald, stared straight ahead while their wives, Amy and Katy, suffered in the throes of agony, both doubled over and nearly hyperventilating.

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Swish. 62-61. Mark bent over at the waist and clutched Joe’s chair, while the Guys and the Fitzgeralds nervously cheered.

Swish, tie ballgame and at worst, most likely a shot at overtime. “He’s gonna make it,’’ coach Tony Bennett’s wife, Laurel, mouthed from a few rows behind.

Swish.

63-62

Eruption.

Bedlam.

While the Guys and the Fitzgeralds collided into such a familial clutch of overwhelming joy they nearly fell down in a heap, Mark simply turned around. “I can’t believe it,’’ he said. “I. Can. Not. Believe. It.’’ He jumped onto his chair and thrust his arms over his head in victory. He then ran everywhere and nowhere, hugging family, friends and strangers, dashing toward the bench and up the aisle, in a whirling celebration every bit as chaotic as the last minutes of Virginia’s win over Auburn on Saturday night.

On the day a doctor puts an infant in your arms, the world flips upside down and never quite rights itself. Through trial and error you figure it out, this parenthood thing, but while your brain might be able to manage, your heart doesn’t necessarily follow. The celebrations, the happy days, those are the easy part. It’s the failures and sometimes worse, living through the sliver of gray that separates joy from sorrow, that are near impossible. Every parent who has watched a child waddle up to his or her first at-bat in a tee ball game or take the stage in a dance recital or flub a line in a school play knows the feeling. It is pride cocktailed with a pit in the belly hollowed with fear. Please, Lord, let it all be OK.

Mark Jerome is a basketball coach by trade, a practical man who can watch a game with a detached and clinical eye. He sees plays as they develop, intuitively aware of where the ball ought to go. But a little before 5 p.m. Central time on Saturday, when he took his seat in section V2, Row 4 behind the Virginia bench, he closed his eyes and exhaled as he prepped to watch his first-born play for a chance at his dream, unaware his son would go on to lead Virginia in points (21), rebounds (nine) and assists (six). “C’mon baby boy,’’ he said as Virginia junior Ty Jerome took the floor. “C’mon. Let’s do this.’’

On the day his son came home from the hospital, Mark tucked an NBA regulation ball in his crib. “You’re crazy,’’ people told him. But Mark played a bit collegiately himself and hoped maybe his son would inherit his joy for the game. He needn’t worried. Ty swallowed the sport whole, so sure it was his thing that he’d strut into the gym, a puny 7-year-old with his chest puffed out and shoulders back, convinced he was the best player on the floor. “He was good,’’ Mark said. “But not that good.’’ Together they forged a dream, learning along the way how to work on the dream together. Mark coached Ty for years but was wildly demanding, so hard he feels slightly embarrassed looking back on his behavior now. But the confidence and toughness worked, creating a player who doesn’t so much walk on the court as he struts. As he and his Virginia teammates came out for their national semifinal game against Auburn, Ty looked like he still believed he was the best player on the floor. “I wonder what he’s thinking,’’ Mark said as he watched his son. “I wonder if he’s nervous, or if he’s thinking, ‘We got this.’’’

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The two spoke briefly earlier in the day, Mark reporting that Ty seemed a lot less nervous than he did, but that was before the game, before 72,000 people took their seats. Eighteen years ago Mark attended the Final Four in Minneapolis, back when it was played in the Metrodome. He sat two rows from the tippy top, happy just to be in the building. Now here he was, just feet from the court, cell phone out, recording his son being introduced as a player in the Final Four. “The first time he got in a game as a freshman, and you saw that name on the back — Jerome — I mean, I can’t even explain it,’’ he said. “Now this. Look at this. It’s unreal.’’

He was calm for a while, reverting to the comfort of his coaching knowledge. He pointed out that Ty’s first free-throw attempt looked flat (before it missed) and yelled when he saw DeAndre Hunter with a mismatch he could expose. (He scored.) He traded a few fist bumps with Joe Guy after Kyle drained a 3 and shouted an exasperated “Why?” when Mamadi Diakite took an ill-advised shot from deep. When Ty drained a second-chance 3 to give the Cavaliers a 25-24 edge late in the first half, he implored Virginia to “pull away here.’’ Instead Auburn went on a 7-3 sprint and took a 31-28 advantage at the break. Mark plopped in his seat and pulled up the box score on his phone. “If two of our guys are good, we’re good, but if we can get three going we’re tough to beat,’’ he said. “We gotta get Dre (Hunter) going.’’

Mark left his seat inside the Spectrum Center in Charlotte with time left on the clock last year, the outcome long since decided. Virginia would lose to UMBC, the first 1-seed to fall to a 16 in NCAA Tournament history. He and his ex-wife, Melanie Walker, did their best to console Ty afterward, but they were gutted. Gutted by the loss, but gutted more by the helplessness. “As a parent, that’s the absolute worst part,’’ Mark said, reflecting on that game during halftime. “You always want to fix things for your kid, but you can’t. It is the worst feeling in the world.’’ It took Mark days to watch the replay of the game, a 45-minute phone call with Bennett finally helping him to process it. He checked in with Ty periodically, finally relaxing when he saw he had posted a picture on Instagram from a Kevin Hart show with his teammates. “I realized he was feeling better,’’ he said.

The goal, Mark said, wasn’t to avenge that loss. It wasn’t fixable. It would live in the record books forever, and so when everyone thought the Cavaliers were relieved simply to beat Gardner-Webb, Mark knew better. “The goal wasn’t to win the first-round game,’’ he said. “The goal was to get to a Final Four and win a national championship.’’ Just before the players returned to the court, 20 minutes of basketball between them and that chance, Laurel Bennett bounded the steps and clapped her hands. “Everybody all right?” she asked.

They were, at least for a little while. As Mark predicted, Bennett got Hunter going, the 6-foot-7 sophomore smartly driving at the rim for four quick points.  Two Kihei Clark free throws gave Virginia a 36-31 lead and Mark yelled, “Two stops. We need two stops.’’ Except for the stops never came, Auburn answering every time the Cavaliers tried to pull away. As the minutes ticked down and the Tigers refused to go away, more than once Mark lamented, “We can’t get separation.” Much to the exhausted delight of Mark, it finally came, mostly courtesy of Ty. He scored five of Virginia’s seven points in a critical run, draining a 3 that his father called “short, short, short,’’ before falling into a delirious heap at being proven wrong. “His feet weren’t right,’’ Mark said. “That’s why I thought it was short.’’ Still unable to silence his inner coach, Mark eyed the clock and even up, 57-47, saw there was still more than five minutes left, cautioning anyone who would listen, “There’s too much time, too much time.’’

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Nineteen seconds later when Ty was whistled for his third foul, Mark whispered, “That could be big.’’ He did not want to be right (and when Ty was called for his fourth foul 31 seconds later, the anxiety only grew). He wanted the Cavaliers to coast to the win, especially after enduring the Elite Eight overtime victory just a week earlier. That game against Purdue, in which Carsen Edwards scored 42 points in what Mark termed “the greatest single performance I’ve ever seen,’’ Mark left the arena feeling like a wrung-out dishrag, thrilled to be going to the Final Four but not sure his heart could stomach another close one. He didn’t get his wish. “I knew it,’’ he said as Auburn started to make its push.  “I knew it.’’

There it was again. Just like last year — the helplessness. At first, it was just nervous, Mark jangling his knee as Bryce Brown drained 3s, or slapping the chair in front of him. But when Anfernee McLemore hit two free throws to cap a 14-point run and put Auburn up four with 17.7 seconds left, Section V2 felt more like a puddle of despair. Amy Guy, who said she cried at least 12 times before the game started, sat in her chair, head bowed, her arm slung around Katy. Joe Guy and Tim Fitzgerald stared ahead, while Mark waffled between sitting and standing, as if his body couldn’t quite figure out how to prepare for the ending. “I’m going to be sick,’’ he said. “We had this won.’’

Parenthood requires both the cynicism of a realist and the eternal hope of an optimist, allowing a mother or a father to prepare themselves to console without giving up entirely. Kyle Guy’s corner 3 and Jared Harper’s split of two free throws meant Virginia had a chance, but Auburn had two fouls to give, which drained the clock all the way down to near extinction. Mark stood like a sentry, arms folded across his chest, the coach in him knowing that 1.5 seconds doesn’t leave room for much more than a miracle, the dad praying maybe the Cavaliers could create one.

When Kyle’s last hope of a shot bounced off the rim, the noise in the stadium temporarily drowned out the whistle. The way the seats behind the benches sit in this football stadium retrofitted for hoops, they are near eye level with the elevated court. For a split second, no one could quite figure out what had happened. “Foul,” someone screamed, and as the officials came to the scorer’s table, it started to sink in. “Oh, my God, it’s happening again!” Katy Fitzgerald yelled. While the officials determined whether it was a 2- or a 3-point shot, Mark spied the big screen review and immediately proclaimed, “It was a 3.’’

“Just like in the backyard,’’ Dick Patterson, Kyle’s grandfather, repeated to himself as his grandson stepped to the line, with near 150,000 eyeballs on him and the anger of an entire Auburn fan section voicing its displeasure. Despite insisting he could not watch, Mark did watch. He watched every single free throw, exhaling and spinning in a circle after Kyle drained each one, before setting off on his wayward tour of giddy joy.  

My phone rang 15 minutes later. It was Mark, calling to apologize. He had dashed off in such a frenzy, he left his sweatshirt behind and never stopped to explain how he felt. Turns out, he still couldn’t. “This team,’’ he said. “The character, I don’t even know what to say. I can’t believe what just happened. I can’t believe what I just saw. I can’t …’’ He stopped, exhausted and drained.

“Well,’’ he said. “I’ll see you on Monday.’’

(Top photo of Ty Jerome: Bob Donnan/USA Today Sports)