NCAA Basketball: 25 greatest buzzer beaters of all time

5. Virginia stays alive with game-tying buzzer-beater (2019)

Are we prisoners of the moment with this one? It’s hard to argue this isn’t one of the top five or top 10 buzzer-beaters of all time, judging by the significance of it and what it eventually led to.

Plus, the fact that all hope seemed to be lost for Virginia throughout this entire sequence.

Purdue was on the verge of knocking off the No. 1 seed and heading to their first Final Four in decades, but Mamadi Diakite had other plans.

As Ty Jerome purposely missed a free throw with a two-point deficit and six seconds left, both teams scrambled to get the rebound and the Boilermakers would have sealed the win. But Diakite tipped the ball out beyond half court, which was dribbled up quickly and fired back to the big man with a second on the clock.

Diakite caught the ball high, kept it up and shot an awkward-looking jumper to tie the game and send it to overtime.

Without this buzzer-beating jumper, Virginia wouldn’t have completed the most epic turnaround from one season to the next, going from being upset by No. 16 UMBC in 2018 to winning the national title in 2019.