In 1983, former NC State basketball coach Jim Valvano published an autobiographical account of his team's drive to the national title, a run so classic it has become part of the annals of college basketball.

Viewers got to rewatch that famous win over Houston in the championship game Saturday afternoon on CBS. Below are excerpts from Valvano's chapter on that contest titled, simply, "National Champions!"

Related link: Part I of the excerpts

We started out the Houston game with a dunk, and I was a maniac. I, too, was sky high. When we got that first dunk, I knew we would win. When we started out strong in games, we never lost. The other team might catch us because they were good teams. That didn’t matter, though, because we were so confident.

When we went in at the half, we were up eight. We had played as perfect a first half of basketball as we possibly could play against that team. I couldn’t ask for more. We held them to 25 points. The score was 33-25, and we looked great. The kids felt they could win. They realized Houston wasn’t that different from the other great teams we had been playing.

Contrary to popular belief, we were playing with them. Our defense was solid.

Houston wasn’t coming down and doing things at will on the offensive boards. Our kids were holding their own, but it would have been awfully nice if we could have shot a little better in the first half.

I became very selfish during halftime. I wanted to win so badly. To have gone that far, have an eight-point lead and then not win the game would have broken my heart. I wanted to win the national championship and to cut the nets down.

I told our kids they had 20 minutes to make their mark in collegiate history. I’m a historian of the game. I told them you don’t get these opportunities in life very often, and that there have been only 27 coaches in the history of the game to win a national championship. I had a shot at one, and they did, too.

I said, “Please believe me. You will never, ever, for the rest of your life in whatever field you go into, whether you’re a pro or not a pro, whether you’re selling insurance, teaching, selling cars, clothes or whatever, you will never, ever, have the emotion and the feeling you will have when the final buzzer goes off and we win. Never again. I’ve never lied to you, and I’m not lying now.

“And should we lose, you will think about that the rest of your life. You’ll say to yourself, ‘What could I have done, what if, why?’ I’m not saying what a wonderful journey it’s been, and let’s just go out there and do the best we can and have fun. I’m saying let’s go win the national championship. There’s no reason not to now.”

I expected, the way we were playing, to be up by 12 at halftime. I was disappointed we didn’t have a larger lead. We were going to need it because I knew Houston would make a great run at us. They were too good not to make a run. They had won 26 games in a row. They had manhandled Louisville and Villanova, two excellent teams. Houston was as awesome as any team that has ever played in the NCAA finals.

We were calm in the locker room and discussed what we had to do. I told our kids that Houston would come out smoking and that we had to stop their run early. We had to get a couple of baskets quickly, and we had to maintain our lead over them for five minutes. I told them if we could do that, we would have a great chance to win. But we didn’t.

Houston outscored us 17-2 at the opening of the second half. We scored only two points in ten minutes and were down 42-35. That’s the bad news. The good news was that we were down only seven. We were still controlling everything we wanted to control. They weren’t getting dunks and follow shots, and they weren’t running up and down the court. Houston was beating us because we couldn’t score.

We knew we had to stop their run soon, but we felt we still had a shot. We had been there so often, we weren’t scared or nervous when Houston got ahead. It was critical, though, that something good happen to us. That’s when the much-talked-about delay game of Houston, the ‘Locomotion,’ took place.

Far be it for me to criticize anyone, and I never will. Houston’s coach Guy Lewis had just been selected as the AP Coach of the Year and has won 500 games in his career. He just did something coaches have done for the history of time. He tried to eat a little clock and score. There’s nothing wrong with that.

It’s wrong only because it didn’t work. That’s the only reason. It could have worked just as easily. The first time they went to their delay game, it did work, and they got a layup.

We were going to foul as a strategy. I wasn’t going to get to the final game and let the clock go when I was losing. If we were going to lose, I didn’t care if the margin was by 20 or one. Our decision was to make Houston have to win the game. We were going to determine the outcome. They would have to hit their free throws to beat us. If they did that, then I would take the high fives and the number ones. That would be fine. They would deserve it. I felt that strategy was a lot better than chasing their people around trying for a steal and then have someone get loose and jam the ball in our faces.

We tried fouling Clyde Drexler first. He knocked in two, so we were not going to touch him again. We fouled other people. When the clock got down close to a minute, we wanted to foul their freshman point guard Alvin Franklin, and we did with 1:05 remaining. The score was tied then, 52-52, thanks to some great clutch shooting by Dereck, Sidney and Terry.

Most people remember only the shots and free throws our opposition missed during our nine-game run. How about all the times our kids had to go down and score at the other end? We scored just about every time we had to in the big games. Our players hit six of their last seven outside shots against Houston.

Foul shots are very difficult to make. It’s not a question of choking. Kids don’t choke. You don’t get 26 straight wins, you don’t become ranked number one in the country, and you don’t beat the people Houston beat if you choke. To say that about players is unfair.

What they do is miss. Just like a batter strikes out in baseball, a running back fumbles in football, or a golfer misses a five-foot putt. Every situation is difficult, and hitting free throws is not easy. If it was all that easy, everyone would make them. The pressure of making free throws late in the game is immense. Franklin missed. That’s all.

When he missed the free throw and we got the rebound, I thought we’d win. It had happened so many times like that. We had been in the same situation before, and there was no reason to think we weren’t going to win.

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