As Mick Cronin rewatched what was possibly the most painful defeat of his career, all because he had to scout the same opponent for a rematch the following season, the final sequence was pleasing.

UCLA’s Johnny Juzang reached out with his right arm to grab a rebound and rose to the basket for a putback that tied the game with 3.3 seconds left in overtime of their 2021 Final Four classic Gonzaga scored.

At about that moment, Cronin hit the pause button.

That meant Jalen Suggs never took the throw-in, never frantically dribbled just a few steps beyond halfcourt, and never fired the shot that bounced off the backboard into the net and broke every Bruin’s heart.

“That shot?” Cronin told the Times this month. “No, I’ve never seen it.”

Two years later, in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament, the Bulldogs gave the UCLA coach another reason to specifically watch the replay. Just moments after Amari Bailey’s three-pointer gave the Bruins the late lead, Gonzaga’s Julian Strawther reclaimed the lead with another game-winning shot on the edge of the March Madness logo at center court.

What are the chances that the same opponent will shatter your soul twice in essentially the same way?

“Yeah, I know,” Cronin said when reminded. “I mean, it is what it is. Hopefully the ball bounces your way sometimes.”

Saturday would be a good place to start against the team that has tormented Cronin the most. He is 0-4 with the Bruins against Gonzaga – and suffered another bitter overtime loss to coach Mark Few’s team in 2009 when he coached Cincinnati – before a nationally televised matchup between No. 22 UCLA (10-2 ) and the No. 14 Bulldogs (9-3) come to the Intuit Dome.

By nature, coaches tend to dwell on defeats rather than victories; That’s what drives them to keep pushing and trying to be the team on the other side of the table. The hardest defeats are invariably the ones that end the season.

“At UCLA,” Cronin said, “I am 9-3 in the NCAA tournament and all three of our losses were brutal.”

Over the course of a career that spanned three schools and 22 seasons, Cronin won 490 games. His three most painful losses — two to Gonzaga and one to North Carolina — may have come in the last five seasons. All competed in the NCAA tournament.

Cronin said the 2021 Gonzaga loss was harder to swallow than the 2023 Gonzaga loss because the latter setback involved the loss of top defenseman Jaylen Clark and starter Adem Bona to injuries.

“It would have been an incredible win without those two guys,” Cronin said. “To me we were big underdogs and I don’t know how much gas we had left in the tank when we played without those two guys. So I don’t know how far we would have gone.”

The Bruins might as well have been shorthanded in the 2021 Final Four matchup, considering starting guard Jules Bernard woke up that morning with severe food poisoning. Severely weakened, he only took three shots and scored five points in 18 minutes.

“Those are the things that bother me more than crazy shooting or anything like that because the injuries, you know, you can’t prepare for it, you can’t plan for it, you can’t do anything about it,” Cronin said. “It just happens.”

A year later, in the Sweet 16 against North Carolina, forward Jaime Jaquez Jr. missed his final nine shots because of a severely sprained ankle he had injured just days earlier in the final minutes of a win over Saint Mary’s.

“I was just about to take him out of the game,” Cronin said with a dark laugh.

UCLA remained in excellent position to beat the Tar Heels even with Jaquez essentially playing on one leg. The Bruins led by three points with less than two minutes to play, then everything that could go wrong for them happened.

A Caleb Love three went wide, the ball bouncing off the rim and inches from the court before North Carolina teammate Armando Bacot made a wild over-the-shoulder save straight to Love, whose next three from Caleb Love went out. The pointer went in. Love added another three-pointer, Jaquez’s cold streak deepened with three more missed shots and the Tar Heels won by five points.

It was a sequence reminiscent of the game between the teams last weekend, when the Bruins blew a 16-point lead in a 76-74 setback against the Tar Heels in the CBS Sports Classic. Of course, a defeat in December never hurts as much as one in March.

“I just think that team,” Cronin said of the 2022 version that lost to North Carolina, “was deep enough that we could have won the title.”

Acknowledging the difficulty of processing repeated grief, Cronin said, “You have to be an adult and mature.”

“Yeah, it’s not easy to deal with, but look, I have a pretty good perspective in life,” Cronin said. “I am the son of a high school coach who rose to coach at UCLA. So if I start complaining, I don’t think many people will listen, nor should they. Nobody feels sorry for me.

“So, I mean, I just think sometimes it’s out of the question; Hopefully one day it will be in the cards for you. All you can do is keep working at it.”

Additionally, one of Cronin’s greatest failures led to perhaps his greatest success. What would have happened if his Cincinnati team hadn’t blown a 22-point lead against Nevada in the second round of the 2018 NCAA Tournament?

“I kind of put that in the can,” Cronin said. “Yes, it was brutal, but if that hadn’t happened I’d probably still be here. They probably would have given me a lifetime contract or something crazy like that and I’m not here. I probably wouldn’t be the coach at UCLA.”