Naturally, the national championship game will swing on the play of two giants. Sixty-five teams slug for three weeks. The last men standing are 6-foot-10 and 7-foot-1.

"We call 'em power players," Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun said. "It's kind of an upgraded word for center."

Duke was leading UConn 59-56 Saturday when Luol Deng went strong to the basket and Connecticut's Emeka Okafor bloodied Deng's determination with a block.

Okafor followed that with a dunk, and Duke knew right then its season was on an egg timer.

"Russell-ish" is what Calhoun calls the 6-10 Okafor, in tribute to Bill Russell, arguably the best "power player" ever.

The guys at Georgia Tech don't really know what to call Australian Luke Schenscher. Seven-one, wingspan of a turboprop, mop of curly, red hair framing a perpetual puppy face. No worries, mate.

They printed up T-shirts with Schenscher's face on them. "Luke Schenscher Has A Posse" they say.

"I don't know what a posse is," Schenscher says. "I never had one before."

Used to be, every great team had a good center. It was as required as running and defense in the NFL.

Now, if you have a 6-11 guy, he weighs either 150 or 350 and when he chews gum, you better escort him up and down staircases.

Tonight, you'll see Okafor run the floor, pull up for a 10-footer or dirty his hands under the hoop. You'll see Schenscher swing from one side of the lane to the other, like a metronome, attempting high-percentage hooks or swatting away limp Huskies' efforts.

"Either one of those kids can alter the game," Calhoun says. "You don't have too much of that anymore."

Imposing centers are security blankets. Need to press, scramble, take chances on defense? The big guy's got your back. Have to have a basket or a free throw to keep it close? Lob it high, into the post. Centers will always have one advantage over their peers: They're taller.

Okafor and Schenscher could be twin sons of different mothers. Neither bears any of the sense of entitlement that afflicts jocks these days.

Each has parents who grew up overseas. Okafor's family escaped a Nigerian civil war.

Schenscher's clan still lives in a tiny Aussie farming community called Hope Forest (lots of hope, no forest), which he describes as "no shops, two main roads and a couple dirt roads here and there."

Pius Okafor joined the Biafran army at 17 in 1968, because he knew they'd feed him. He moved to Houston, earned an undergraduate degree at Texas Southern in three and a half years, and then an MBA and a master's. Emeka scored 1,310 on his SAT, has a 3.8 GPA at UConn and considered applying for a Rhodes Scholarship.

He once earned three credits in a business calculus course just by getting a B on the exam. And he never attended the class.

"My father's high school education was interrupted by a civil war. He wasn't sure what he was going to eat the next day, much less graduate. I understood my advantage and took advantage of it."

Meanwhile, Schenscher was trying to develop a world-class game in the middle of breadbasket nowhere. "We've got five acres," he says. "Sheep, ducks, chickens." He went to the Australian Institute of Sport, in Canberra, a place where elite Aussie jocks go to get better.

He went to Georgia Tech and in three years has gained 50 pounds and enough post moves so his teammates actually pass him the ball. "Nothing in the game of basketball comes naturally to me," Schenscher says.

Down all those roads and across two continents, Okafor and Schenscher meet tonight, power players at a sweet spot in time. Great guards win NCAA titles. Except when they don't.

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E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com