Gonzaga coach Mark Few breaks down the final possession of the game where West Virginia wasn't able to get a shot off in the final seconds to preserve the Bulldogs' victory. (1:37)

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Przemek Karnowski might as well have been on an island.

With a little less than five minutes left in the first half of Thursday's Sweet 16 matchup against West Virginia, the Gonzaga big man hauled in a rebound on his own end and duly initiated the protocol of the outlet pass. Few things on a basketball court are this mundane. Karnowski, a senior center, has literally thousands of outlets under his belt; it might be the easiest, least stressful part of his job.

On this outlet pass, though, Karnowski didn't find a guard helpfully ready to move up the floor. Instead, he found a gaping chasm carved out by West Virginia's relentless ball denial, one that had stranded him with little more than a beard and a ball.

The castaway of San Jose dribbled a few steps, picked up his dribble, freaked out, and called timeout.

"We don't have him bring the ball up the floor much," Gonzaga coach Mark Few said.

Gonzaga fans, furious about a non-call on guard Nigel Williams-Goss in the open floor a possession earlier, wailed in agony. West Virginia fans roared.

It wasn't a pivotal moment in the game. It wasn't even a turnover. But it felt like a sign of some kind: This was West Virginia's game.

Turns out, it was Gonzaga's too.

"That was just an absolute war," Few said. "Rock fight. However you want to describe it."

If you still needed reasons to believe in Gonzaga -- if the 34-1 record and the All-American performers and NBA prospects and deep rotation and every advanced metric hadn't convinced you -- perhaps Thursday's 61-58 win can push you over the edge. Because the Bulldogs' ability to win that kind of game in the manner they did so should, at the very least, serve as the latest reason to believe: Yes, Gonzaga can get to the Final Four. Yes, Gonzaga can win it all. Yes, Gonzaga can take a punch. Yes, Gonzaga punches back.

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Few teams hit harder than West Virginia. The Mountaineers are renowed for their press -- even their shooting shirts say "Press Virginia" down the left sleeve -- but they're just as tough in the half court, even after the considerable effort made to advance the ball into semi-reasonable scoring position. They're just as tough on the offensive glass, where Bob Huggins' group rebounded nearly 38 percent of its misses on the season.

This blend was as potent as ever Thursday night, hurrying and harassing Few's team, which had planned to attack the pressure but had more than a few moments when it looked as if it might crack under the same. What began as a relatively tidy performance devolved midway through the second half, when the turnovers began to pile up, and Goss, the star guard who had zero fouls at halftime, was called for his second push-off and fourth foul with eight minutes still to play.

By then, the minimal separation Jordan Mathews had created with two huge 3-pointers had evaporated. West Virginia predictably refused to fade away.

"I was very, very concerned, especially in the first half, as we were shuffling through some lineups that, quite frankly, we haven't played all year," Few said. "And then [I was] mildly concerned as it got deeper."

"It's not something you come across," Mathews said. "We had never come across that throughout the season. It wasn't frustration. It was more like, I don't know, confusion, trying to figure it out."

As confusing as things got on the offensive end, though, Gonzaga was always able to fall back on its defense. This is not new. The Bulldogs rank first in adjusted defensive efficiency this season; no team in the country has allowed fewer points per possession, adjusted for its competition. No Gonzaga team, from the one that starred player of the year Adam Morrison to the one that earned the program its first No. 1 seed in 2013, has ever guarded like this.

Which is why West Virginia, even as it scrambled to earn extra opportunities to tie the score in the closing seconds, couldn't find a single makeable one -- and were left helpless without an attempt as the final buzzer sounded.

Few said it was disappointing not to "dig out" any of those rebounds, but in the end Gonzaga didn't need to. It could do what it had done all season along, one more time.

"The Mountaineers, man," Few said later, sighing in relief. "They do not make it easy."

Then again, neither does Gonzaga.