Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in EnglishSAN ANTONIO – From the far corner of the Alamodome floor, Walter Clayton Jr. made one last play to take his team to Monday night: A loose ball, pursued and then saved back into play as time ran off the clock. The Florida star then stood there, stone-faced, clapping his hands while everyone else celebrated. No need to get excited. It was not his first resurrection project.The most loaded men’s basketball conference in the country opened the most loaded Final Four ever with a banger, and nobody delivered in a bigger way than Clayton, whose career-high 34 points paced the Gators’ 79-73 win over Auburn. And into Monday’s national championship game Florida went, awaiting either Duke or Houston.It was Florida bolting up off the mat yet again in this event, turning an eight-point halftime deficit on its head. The Gators were nearly ground into oblivion by two-time defending champion UConn in the second round. They were on a very precarious precipice in the Elite Eight against Texas Tech, facing a double-digit deficit late in the second half.On Saturday at the Alamodome, they looked oddly skittish and uncharacteristically slow in the first half against the top overall seed in the men’s NCAA Tournament.And the program’s third national title is nevertheless 40 minutes away.Because Florida has Walter Clayton Jr. and the other teams didn’t.It’s not as much of an oversimplification as it seems. The senior All-American guard hit all the big shots to save the day against UConn. He hit two of the biggest shots against Texas Tech. And Saturday night was more of the same, with Clayton scoring 20 of his 34 points in the second half — the most crucial being a three-point play with 93 seconds left that provided Florida a six-point cushion in a game short on breathing room for either side. (Not shockingly, the showdown featured 15 lead changes and 10 ties.)
“I got a bunch of guys around me that trust me” 🤞
Walter Clayton Jr. reacts postgame after @GatorsMBK’s HUGE #MFinalFour win 🤩#MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/yFJ0aMxGqw
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) April 6, 2025It is sort of a championship on its own, unofficially, being the last team remaining out of a record 14 invitees from the SEC. There will be the usual provincial arguments about which league was actually the strongest. Of course. It doesn’t change the fact that playing men’s basketball in the SEC amounted to three months of chasing down cheetahs and then wrestling with them.So this was a final affirmation of sorts, before Florida gets to the business of trying to take down either Duke or Houston on Monday night. The Gators beat Auburn, at Auburn, on Feb. 8, and that officially was no accident. The Gators won the SEC tournament, and though they did so without facing the other best team in the league in that event, this victory on this stage more than compensated. There was no better team from The Land of It Just Means More, and arguably no better avatar for the SEC altering the paradigm of men’s college basketball.It’s worth remembering that Florida had made it to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament just once in its last nine tries. The program’s excellence under Billy Donovan was the historical exception, not the rule, given what occurred before his arrival and after his departure. And the school extricated itself from the malaise by hiring a 30-something coach who was a former walk-on guard in the West Coast Conference, who implemented an approach that traces its origins to the Ivy League.This, as they say, is not normal.But now, on Monday night, there’s a chance to tie the string to those back-to-back championship squads of 2006 and 2007 … while credibly making the case for setting an entirely new standard in Gainesville. To go with one widely accepted calculation of relative dominance: Those two Florida teams finished with adjusted efficiency margins of plus-28.28 and plus-30.81, respectively, per KenPom.com. This one woke up on the morning of the national semifinals with a margin of plus-36.06. And then it reached the championship game of one of the most loaded Final Fours ever. On the same day the coach of those back-to-back champions became a Hall of Fame, to boot.“It was kind of calming to have a chance to be here, sharing this moment, to have Florida be in the Final Four and get a chance to watch some of the game,” Donovan said at a news conference announcing the 2025 inductees. “It’s kind of ironic how it all worked out.”The SEC’s best took each other’s measure immediately on Saturday. And very clearly on purpose.Auburn’s first call? A Broome back-down into a bucket. Florida’s first set? Getting Clayton off a screen for a 3-pointer. A couple of All-American swings right from the jump.Auburn’s assertiveness didn’t wane over the first 20 minutes. The Gators, meanwhile, wound up scraping by. Auburn had 26 points in the paint before halftime, definitively diminishing any depth advantage that Florida had in the frontcourt. (Broome, with 12 first-half points, was getting wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted to get there.) On the other end, the Tigers forced the Gators into halfcourt stagnation; Florida had just three assists on 12 baskets in the first half and zero fast-break points. Clayton and Alijah Martin combined for eight field goals between them. The rest of the roster? Four, total.Florida flipped the vibe soon after the break, with spirited defense and aggressive offense fueling an 11-0 run. Auburn snagged the lead back over the next two possessions, and then a bit of a stalemate settled in: The Tigers plugged along, and Clayton kept making ridiculous plays to keep his team on Auburn’s hip. When one of them pulled ahead, they weren’t ahead for particularly long. It was exactly the sort of tug-of-war you’d expect from heatedly familiar No. 1 seeds who took turns looking like the nation’s best team this season.When Martin sailed in for a montage-worthy dunk with five-and-a-half minutes left — and with Broome in a deep funk, hitting just one shot in the second half to that point — it seemed as if Florida may have found something, even if the lead was only 66-63 at that stage. But Auburn was still within one with two minutes to go, lingering despite bad shot choices and sloppy ballhandling.From there, Clayton exploited a mismatch against Auburn big man Dylan Cardwell for a layup and a three-point edge. Broome stepped to the line with 2:02 left and missed two free throws — a brutally unpoetic moment for the player Auburn most needed late, and something like a mortal wound.Because on the next trip down the floor, Clayton completed a three-point play on a drive to cross the 30-point mark again, pushing the lead to 74-68. Clayton then got the assist on a Thomas Haugh bucket with 37.9 seconds to play, stretching the lead to eight and effectively paving the way to Monday night.“One more,” Clayton could be seen saying to all the teammates and staffers offering him handshakes on the floor in the aftermath. It’s what he’s willed Florida to all spring.(Photo: Alex Slitz / Getty Images)
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