The final score in Albuquerque on 4 April 1983. North Carolina State beat Houston, the top ranked team in the country, with a shot that missed.
Phi Slama Jama
Houston were nicknamed for the way they played: above the rim, on the break, with dunks as the point rather than the flourish. They won thirty one games that season.
Two of them, Akeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, went on to the Basketball Hall of Fame. They were expected to win the championship and nobody thought the expectation was unreasonable.
The team that should not have been there
North Carolina State had lost ten games. They were champions of the Atlantic Coast Conference, which got them into the tournament, and they became the first team ever to win the national title in a season with ten defeats.
The last possession
Tied at fifty two with forty four seconds left, State held the ball for a final shot. Houston's Benny Anders came close to stealing it as the clock ran down.
Dereck Whittenburg gathered the deflected ball almost thirty feet from the basket and shot. It was a desperation attempt and it fell short of the rim.
Lorenzo Charles was under the basket. He caught the ball in the air and stuffed it through with one second on the clock.
What happened next
Jim Valvano ran onto the floor with his arms up, looking for somebody to hold on to, and could not find anyone in the confusion. The sequence has been shown at every tournament since.
Valvano died of cancer ten years later, at forty seven. Lorenzo Charles died in 2011, at forty seven, driving a bus.
Why the number is the shot
The print carries fifty four to fifty two because the margin is the whole event: a game decided by two points, on a shot that was never going in, caught by the one player standing in the right place.