This time, John Pelphrey was on right side of ‘Laettner play.’ It still ended in pain.

One week ago, in the finals of the men’s Ohio Valley Conference basketball tournament, Tennessee Tech Coach John Pelphrey came agonizingly close to experiencing a hoops “poetic moment” for the ages.

With the ex-Kentucky forward’s team trailing Southeast Missouri State by two points with 2.2 seconds left in the game, Pelphrey saw his players perfectly execute the exact play that, in 1992, had ended his own UK playing career in one of the most dramatic moments in college basketball history.

Quicker than you could say, “There’s a pass to Laettner,” Tennessee Tech’s Jaylen Sebree rifled a three-quarters-court pass to teammate Diante Wood. Catching and spinning in one motion, the 6-foot-4, 210-pound Wood launched a turnaround jumper from near the three-point arc just ahead of the final buzzer.

When the ball went in, it took a moment to fully grasp the meaning of what had unfolded:

A team coached by Pelphrey had just successfully extended its season by replicating the play that Duke stars Grant Hill and Christian Laettner executed with brutal efficiency to give the Blue Devils a 104-103 victory over Kentucky in the 1992 NCAA Tournament East Region finals in what many still consider the greatest college hoops game ever played.

Pelphrey, of course, had been one of the UK defenders who watched Laettner spin, shoot and break the hearts of Kentucky backers.

Thirty-one years later, as the officials went to the replay monitor to judge whether or not Wood’s shot had been a three-pointer, it seemed for a fleeting moment that the hoops gods might have granted Pelphrey a karmic payback for the ages.

Alas, the replay showed Wood’s shot was not a trey. Rather than having sent Tennessee Tech’s to its first NCAA Tournament since 1963, the Golden Eagles’ version of “the Laettner play” had instead forced overtime. There, after opening a four-point lead over SEMO, Tennessee Tech could not hold it and fell 89-82.

“I guess I have a little bit of that in my DNA — being part of great games that don’t go my way,” Pelphrey said Wednesday via the phone.

Not shockingly, Pelphrey said Tennessee Tech does not call the play that sent the OVC tourney title game into extra time “the Christian Laettner play.”

“We call it ‘Hail Mary,’” Pelphrey said. “(Sebree) did an unbelievable job throwing it. (Wood) did an unbelievable job catching it. ... The throw and the catch in that particular play (are) what is amazing. (Wood) did an unbelievable job of getting it and just getting a shot off. We were super-fortunate to have a chance to go to overtime.”

When we spoke mid-week, Pelphrey had not yet watched the full video from the game that ended the season for the Golden Eagles (16-17, 11-7 OVC regular season). “(There have been) a couple of other things I wanted to deal with before I dive back into that pain,” he said.

Nevertheless, Pelphrey doesn’t need to rewatch the contest to know he was proud of the fight Tennessee Tech displayed in forcing overtime after trailing SEMO by seven, 72-65, with 1:11 left in regulation.

That reflected the same resilience Tech had shown in overcoming a 5-10 non-conference start to go 11-7 in OVC play and earn the No. 2 seed in the league tournament.

“Super-proud of our players,” Pelphrey said.

Pelphrey, 54, took the Tennessee Tech coaching job after the Golden Eagles had gone 8-23 in Steve Payne’s final season as head man in 2018-19. Getting the Tech program moving in a positive direction has not been easy. Tennessee Tech went 9-22, 5-22 and 11-21 in Pelphrey’s first three seasons.

For a program in need of a complete rebuild, Pelphrey said the recruiting restrictions that limited personal contact and campus visits during the COVID-19 pandemic made a hard task even more daunting. That is because it made evaluating players, both their on-the-court qualities and their personalities, much harder, Pelphrey said.

“This has been our greatest challenge here in coaching,” Pelphrey said of Tennessee Tech. “To be that close to finishing it off (and making the NCAA Tournament), it would have been tremendous.”

As for running “the Laettner play” in a game, Pelphrey said the only other time he remembers being on a coaching staff that used the strategy successfully came as an assistant to Billy Donovan at Florida in a game vs. LSU. “I remember we threw the ball to Udonis Haslem. He got fouled, hit two free throws ... and then we won in overtime,” Pelphrey said.

The emotions of March Madness swing wildly based on mere inches.

Think about it. Had Wood’s shot last Saturday night in Evansville, Ind., been fully launched from behind the three-point arc, it would have ended Tennessee Tech’s 60-year NCAA tourney drought. It would have sent John Pelphrey to the NCAA Tournament as a head coach with a third different school (South Alabama 2006, Arkansas 2008).

Most poignantly, it would have returned Pelphrey to the NCAA tourney in 2023 as a coach via the same play that sent him out of the NCAA tourney as a player — and ended his college career — in 1992.

It is hard to imagine a more poetic possible outcome to a basketball game.

Picking up on the literary metaphor, “I guess it’s called a tragedy now,” John Pelphrey said.