Seton Hall turns trick on Wildcats in second half in RBC Center

RALEIGH, N.C. ö Typical Arizona basketball.

A sluggish start erased a late second-half run. A marquee point guard stepped up to throw one dagger after another, carrying his team to an NCAA tournament victory.

The only difference: Seton Hall turned the Wildcats' own tricks against them, kicking Arizona to the proverbial NCAA curb after just a single game with a 80-76 victory. The loss marked the Wildcats' earliest March exit since a first-round defeat at the hands of Oklahoma in 1999.

The eighth-seeded Pirates rattled off a 23-5 second-half run immediately after Arizona gained its largest lead of the game, a 14-point advantage with 14 minutes to play.

For the Wildcats, the loss was the most recent example of the enigma that has been Arizona's 2003-04 season, a season that saw the Wildcats lose three times to a Pac-10 team for the first time ever and that brought the UA into the NCAA tournament with its lowest seed in 17 years.

"We just got comfortable with the lead," junior shooting guard Salim Stoudamire said. "We just went through the motions and that's what messed up our game."

Freshman point guard Mustafa Shakur agreed that the Wildcats let the game slip away as much as Seton Hall took over in the second half.

"We were definitely in command of the game," he said. "We tried to maintain instead of stepping up."

According to Stoudamire, "going through the motions" was what plagued the Wildcats all season long, not just against Seton Hall.

"I think we played like that the whole season," Stoudamire said. "We were consistently inconsistent, and that showed again tonight."

The same Wildcat team which relied on runs of 15 or more points seven times this season ö most recently a 20-2 spurt during their regular-season finale against Arizona State in McKale Center ö weren't able to respond when the Pirates scored eight straight to kick off their own second-half drive.

To add insult to Arizona's historical resume, it was a "point-guard U" opponent -- Andre Barrett, Seton Hall's own stand-up playmaker -- who assured his team of a date with Atlanta region top-seed Duke Saturday afternoon. Barrett played a game-high 40 minutes, scoring 19 points ö including a pair of clutch second-half 3-pointers.

Arizona head coach Lute Olson said it was his own team's lack of leadership that ultimately doomed the Wildcats this season.

"We had a hard time dealing with prosperity because of youth and the absence of a take charge player. This is a problem that we have had all year long and were not able to develop from that," he said.

For senior guard Jason Ranne, his final time donning a Wildcat jersey was anything but the storybook ending he hoped would cap his career.

But the recently named team captain, teary eyed and still trying to comprehend what just transpired, said any feeling his teammates have right now has to be motivation when the players look toward preparing for next season. Otherwise, he said they can expect a similar result.

"It was our game, our game to lose -- and we did," Ranne said. "(We) turned it off in the most important game in the year, basically. It's just something you've got to learn from, something that's got to eat at them. Maybe that will provide some fire next year."