INDIANAPOLIS — Game of the year? This wasn’t even the game of the night.
Michigan overpowered Arizona early and whipped the Wildcats for 40 long minutes Saturday at Lucas Oil Stadium, turning their highly anticipated Final Four matchup into a 91-73 Wolverines dunkfest-slash-highlight reel.
Junior center Aday Mara scored a career-high 26 points and grabbed nine rebounds. About the only question in this national semifinal at the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament concerned the health of Wolverines forward Yaxel Lendeborg, a first-team AP All-American who landed on an Arizona player’s foot, rolled his ankle and sprained his knee, but still had 11 points in 14 minutes.
He vowed he’d be ready for Monday’s title matchup against the second-seeded University of Connecticut, a 71-62 winner over third-seeded Illinois in the early semifinal that was billed — wrongly, as it turned out — as the undercard to this battle of No. 1 seeds.
“It’s going to take a full 40 minutes of fighting,” Lendeborg said.