guard Riley LaChance let fly a three-point shot he is capable of making, but 25-foot three-point shots are fickle, and so this last one bounced high off the rim, took its time staying in the air and wound up out of bounds for a Northwestern possession with one second left.

Northwestern won and felt sorry — for Fisher-Davis.

“Absolutely,” Northwestern forward Gavin Skelly said.

“You kind of feel bad for them,” McIntosh said.

“That was confusing for me,” Skelly said. “I’m a very energetic and emotional guy. So, highs and lows, highs and lows, and they fouled B-Mac with, I think, 15 on the clock. And I was kind of, ‘Wait, are we up one?’ So I was looking at the score and making sure I felt that we were in the right position. We were down one. I was really confused because, Why would they put our best free throw shooter at the line? But then I realized it was a mistake.”

“When he grabbed me, I was kind of surprised,” McIntosh said.

That’s our savage March for you, Northwestern. It always reserves its right to drape athletic competition in outright lunacy. “That’s why they call it March Madness,” Skelly said. Guess he must know.

Except for that, he might have spent the remainder of his days wincing every so often because of his own mistake, which he volunteered in conversation. Northwestern Coach Chris Collins sent him in with 26 seconds left for the purpose of switching with McIntosh and onto LaChance. Skelly failed to do it, Skelly said. LaChance went rampaging into the frontier around the basket for a surging layup, and Vanderbilt got its lead with 17 seconds left. “That could have lost us the game,” Skelly said. “So it’s a game of mistakes — whoever can make the most mistakes, no, whoever can make the least mistakes.”

It’s both of those, yes. Yet as people try to process these things, there’s often some other, funky happening, maybe even something to direct the brain away from sympathy for a college student. That, there was. At the 4:06 mark, the 2:30 mark and the 0:26 mark, Vanderbilt fouled and sent Northwestern center Dererk Pardon to the foul line. Normally, this would be prudent. Pardon made 31 of 60 free throws during the 2016-17 season, a tad off his similarly chilly rate of 27-for-51 during the 2015-16 season.

Pardon made — and swished — all six. This made for the curious possibility that Pardon, the maker of Northwestern’s most famous shot of the season as the horn sounded against Michigan on March 1, might just be one of those rare human beings who prefers atrocious, stultifying pressure when shooting free throws.

“I do better in those situations,” said the sophomore from Cleveland. “I don’t know why. But I think I just do ... I have no clue.”

Thereby did Northwestern, one game into its tournament history, offer one of the tournament’s unofficial mottoes: I have no clue. It got 25 points from McIntosh, and the soft shots he produces after his hard drives into the lane are serial beauties. It got a compelling match coming Saturday with No. 1 seed Gonzaga, and the West Region got an arena hallway with a devastated team on one end and McIntosh on the other, saying, “Our heart’s still beating.”

It got a whole helping of March, right in its first classroom.