Almost 20 years ago to the date, the Villanova Wildcats shocked the world. Playing a near-perfect game, a scrappy underdog of a team defeated mighty Georgetown and Patrick Ewing under their glowering and towering head coach John Thompson.

The Hoyas weren't simply the favorite that April Fools' night in Lexington, Ky. They were the most intimidating powerhouse in college basketball since the days of Wooden at UCLA.

How foregone was the conclusion that the Hoyas would win? So much so that CBS' Dick Stockton said at halftime -- with Villanova leading by a point -- "looks like the coronation will have to wait a little longer."

Wow.

That coronation never came, as Villanova missed just one shot (one!) the entire second half en route to a shocking 66-64 victory. It is a story and a game worthy of the re-telling by the seasoned documentary hands at HBO. The one-hour piece entitled "Perfect Upset" is running all this month on the premium cable channel.

When I watched it for the first time on Monday night, the particulars of the story were nothing new to me. As an adolescent in the prime of my sports-watching glory in 1985, I was 16 and had no driver's license and cable TV at my parents' house. That year I lived the Big East on ESPN. Chris Mullin of the St. John's Redman (yep, well before the advent of "political correctness"), Rony Seikaly of Syracuse, Michael Adams of Boston College and all the rest.

In fact, I remember riding on a bus to visit the Washington Times on a field trip in high school the morning after the upset. I sat on the bus both stunned and pissed off while staring off into the early spring grayness. Not that I was a huge Hoya fan, but they dominated the D.C. area at the time, even with Len Bias at Maryland.

So, of course I rooted for them, even though I found Thompson to be strangely combative with the world outside his basketball team. It didn't help that at a mostly white Jesuit school, Thompson's teams were almost universally all black. Constantly lacking even the obligatory spot-up white-guy jump shooter that almost every college team had in its arsenal; it is safe to say that I never dreamed of someday playing for the Hoyas. There were no Reggie Williams pictures on my wall, and I did not own a Georgetown starter jacket.

But the Hoyas with Ewing were awesome to watch, and surely this was to be their night. A title had been thrown away (literally) two years ago when Freddie Brown became inexorably linked with James Worthy, and a supernova freshman named (at the time) "Mike" Jordan pierced our sporting atmosphere for the first time. Following their championship the previous spring in Seattle, the Hoyas were about to be cemented with the ever-difficult "back-to-back" stamp of greatness.

Then, sports happened. Villanova won.

The documentary does a fine job of detailing the how and the why of it all, despite the fact that many of the events in that game simply defy explanation. What I enjoyed most about the one-hour special was just the antiquated nature of how the game was played at the time. Specifically...