One of the most beautiful stories of European basketball just unfolded in Badalona. Rytas Vilnius just managed to overcome a 20-point gap to beat AEK Athens 86-92 in the Basketball Champions League Final and win their first European trophy ever.
This is a huge achievement which needs to be acknowledge properly, because it was one of the (if not the) biggest comebacks in an European final ever. Even surpassing the legendary Euroleague final in 2012, when Olympiakos beat CSKA Moscow after a miraculous one-handed shot by Printezis. The excitement of today’s game in Badalona did not come any shorter than that, since the score at the end of the third quarter was 63-45 for the Greek side. Yes, you read that right: an 18-point lead for AEK at the beginning of the last quarter of an European final. And it was not enough to secure the win. Why?
The Lithuanian side managed to score 35 points in the last quarter to send the game to overtime. It is to be noted that the team scored 45 in the first three quarters of the game. But then Jerrick Harding, unnoticed so far thanks to a great defense by AEK players, started to score, and Simas Lukosius, who averaged barely over 7 points per game in the competitions so far, joined him to somehow pull off one of the most sensational scoring runs in the history of BCL, hitting 7 3-point shoots in a row in the last quarter. In a final game. Unbelievable.
This was just enough to send the game to overtime (80-80). By then, AEK players were shocked enough to stop believing that they could win a game that a few minutes ago was already won thanks to a great performance by Bartley and Nunnally. AEK players simply thought the game was over by the end of the third quarter, but Lukosius (MVP of the game) and his mates had something different in mind.
In the end, it was a triumph of faith, of believing in one’s strenght over anything else, no matter the odds. And it also shows how important is for a team to feel the support of their people, coming to Spain all the way from Lithuania. We witnessed it and hereby give testimony of this beautiful achievement to be remembered.
