Maryland’s last second 72-71 win over Colorado State during the opening weekend of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament awakened a painful high school memory.

On February 23, 1954, I was a junior and a starter on the Solvay (NY) High School basketball team, and we ended our regular season against North Syracuse High School. They had one of our league’s best teams and were led by six-foot-six Maury Yeomans, who went on to play football at Syracuse University, where he was a member of the Orange’s 1959 national champions. He then played seven seasons in the National Football League, most of them with the Chicago Bears. But in 1954 he was better known for his basketball ability.

Early in the season North Syracuse had beaten us, 55-47. and we hoped for revenge on our home court. We took the lead early in the final period, but with about forty seconds remaining, we trailed, 58-53. Then Lance Baker, one of our guards, banked in a running left-handed shot from about twenty feet, to narrow the margin.

In those days our gymnasium’s scoreboard didn’t have a digital clock, and was difficult to read. Teams tended to keep playing per usual until the final buzzer, so it was not unusual that North Syracuse wasted little time taking another shot when it might have been smarter to kill the clock by passing the ball around. This was before there was a shot clock and a three-point shot. Teams that were losing did not deliberately commit fouls to stop the action and slow the game to a crawl.

Long story short, we rebounded a missed shot and the ball wound up in Baker’s hands and he dropped in another shot from long distance. We now trailed by one point. Seconds later we intercepted a pass, got the ball to Baker who fired off another one-hander on the run and banked it in just before the buzzer sounded. We ran off the court and up a flight of stairs to our dressing room and celebrated a 59-58 victory ...

Until one of the officials came in to tell us Baker had been whistled for traveling. No one heard the whistle because our tiny gymnasium was packed, and the acoustics were such that four hundred screaming spectators were louder than a full house at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium.

The referee claimed Baker had taken three steps, not two, after he stopped dribbling. To this day I think it was a bum call, but we had no video to prove otherwise ... not that a replay would have changed the result.

So I was irked recently when a replay showed — to my satisfaction, at least — that Maryland’s Derik Queen traveled before he tossed up what proved to be the winning shot against Colorado State.

Gene Steratore, a CBS "rules analyst," offered his opinion that Queen did not travel. He may have mentioned the so-called “gather” clause that gives players a one-step leeway when receiving the ball, an interesting concept that never before seemed to apply to taller players who frequently got called for traveling when smaller counterparts got away with more blatant examples all the time.

Anyway, my interpretation of “gather” is that Queen already had control of the ball and had dribbled a couple of times, then took three steps before shooting. (I may have missed something; perhaps Steratore applies “gather” to the time it takes to stop dribbling and prepare to launch your shot. I don’t think that’s true; hell, I’m not even sure college basketball has a “gather” clause.)

Another thing: Steratore, as a CBS employee, cannot be trusted to be objective, particularly during an event that means so much to his network. Despite all the hype and interest in “March Madness,” much of it fueled by betting, there’s a lot to dislike about the tournament and college basketball in general. It’s the only sport with rules that encourage teams to break them. And much too often officials call fouls against defensive players when it was the offensive player who initiated contact.

No doubt a traveling call would have ruined the ending of what was, at that point, the most exciting game of this year's tournament. Also, college basketball is notorious for having one set of rules for the first thirty-eight minutes, another set for the last two-minutes when obviously deliberate fouls are considered ordinary. I also think that if a vote were taken of those who did not have a rooting or betting interest in the game, the verdict would be: count the basket. It made the exciting game ever more so.

It’s also obvious that, like offensive holding in football, traveling and palming (or carrying) the basketball could be called so repeatedly as to ruin every game. If basketball were officiated by the letter of the law, most point guards wouldn’t make it to half court without being whistled. So officials let them play on.

On the other hand, college basketball, already interrupted by eight — count ’em, eight — unnecessary media timeouts, is further delayed when officials to go the monitors to decide whether a shot is worth three points or only two if a player's foot happened to touch the three-point line. Also causing delays are video replays to determine if a flagrant foul was committed, or to determine which team last touched the ball before it went out of bounds, or to determine if the game clock should be adjusted. (At one point in the tournament, officials went into such a huddle before adding one-tenth of a second.)

Most of these delays are for things that prove to be of little consequence, though my biggest gripe is how they destroy the flow of the game. (There once was a quick way to settle the out-of-bounds question. It was called a jump ball.)

But with so much nit-picking over tenths of seconds, you’d think officials would want to know for sure if a game-winning shot was legitimate. As far as I’m concerned, Derik Queen’s wasn’t.

PS: Solvay and North Syracuse met again in the league playoffs, but this time it wasn’t close. They won, 58-42. By chance we later played in the Central New York basketball tournament at the Syracuse Boys Club and finally won.

Maury Yeomans graduated, and the next season, in my senior year, we beat North Syracuse three times, including the last game played at the North Syracuse High School gymnasium. A bigger school, a new gymnasium and a new name — Cicero-North Syracuse — arrived a year later, and soon a team that was once a bitter rival grew out of our league because Solvay voters decided not to consolidate their high school with neighboring Westvale, which then joined Onondaga Hill to create Westhill High School.