Two-point-two seconds on the clock. Illinois down by a bucket, but in possession of the ball.

Rich McBride inbounds to Dee Brown. Brown looks for the shot, doesn’t find it, and dishes back to McBride. McBride squares up from three-point range. He fires. The ball swishes through the basket, the scoreboard reads 68-66 Illinois, and the Orange Krush storms the court.

“When I’m shooting the ball I don’t look at nothing else but the rim,” McBride said. “I was just looking at the rim. I thought I made it.”

The refs weren’t so sure. As the No. 6 Illini celebrated with fans at center court, Gene Crawford, Glenn Marborg and Terry Wymer gathered at the scorer’s table, huddling around a TV monitor to review the shot.

“At the end, my partner scored it,” Crawford said in a statement released to the media. “By rule, we have to check the replay to see if the ball was released before the red light came on. We had to play it back a couple of times because the monitor flickered. It was finally determined that the ball was still in his hand when the red light went on.”

After several minutes of players, fans and camera crews standing frozen on the court, the call was reversed. The refs ruled that the ball was still in McBride’s hands when the backboard lit, and that the miracle three-point shot did not count. Illinois’ school-record home winning streak is dead at 33 games, brought down by an unranked Big Ten bottom feeder.

It was an end few would have predicted, when Illinois led 39-25 at the half. Illinois started the game with a 13-0 run, and was back in shooting shape, hitting 51.7 percent from the floor.

But the Nittany Lions slowly fought back, eventually taking the lead late in the second half. The crowd, and the team, seemed to hardly notice.

“There was no pressure on us; we’re just coming down and playing,” Penn State coach Ed DeChellis said. “No one thought we could win, other than the 12 guys we’ve got and three or four coaches. There were 16 thousand people who thought Illinois would win.”