Lamont Butler practiced moments like these when he was a young child, shooting on the hoop at his house, counting down to the buzzer of the imaginary shot clock in his mind.
Fast-forward to last summer, when Butler, a junior guard for San Diego State, made one-dribble, pull-up jumpers one of his primary areas of focus in his game, trying to make 10 in a row, 15 in a row, until the move and shot were committed to muscle memory.
That is the way these big moments go: years of dreaming, hours and hours of practice, thousands of shots, boiling down to a couple of tense seconds.