“It’s hard to figure out how you feel after a damn good year,” MSU head coach Tom Izzo said. “We just didn’t have a very good first half and that’s one of the understatements of the year.”

Tigers’ forward Joey Dorsey soared through the air with one hand, guard Antonio Anderson took a side-of-the-rim approach and guard Derrick Rose decided to jump, reverse his body from the basket, pump the ball at his bent knees and power it through the hoop like the net stole his girlfriend.

Words can’t describe what that one did for the crowd.

And by the time the dunk show was over, not even a 17-0 MSU run could help the Spartans back into the game, as the Green and White failed to cut the 30-point first-half lead to fewer than 14.

“That first half of basketball was one of the best I’ve been involved in as a coach,” Memphis head coach John Calipari said. “I loved our discipline, I loved the execution of the offense, I loved how unselfish they were and more importantly, I loved how well they guarded. I was proud to be a part of it.”

Junior center Goran Suton and freshman guard Chris Allen were the only two Spartans who put up impressive numbers in the scoring column, tallying 23 and 20 respectively, and shooting a combined 65.5 percent from the floor.

“I just wanted to compete and that’s all I thought about,” Allen said. “They were so focused on Drew (Neitzel), Raymar (Morgan), Kalin (Lucas) and (Suton) that it helped me get my shot.”

Neitzel capped off the last college basketball game of his career with just six points on 2-for-8 shooting and seven assists, an exit so unlike what many had pictured.

“They did a great job on me — I didn’t get a lot of open looks,” he said. “Anderson did a good job on me and made things tough. I got a lot of things going through my head. My career is over as far as a college basketball player.”

The other senior, center Drew Naymick, tallied four points and one rebound in his college departure.

Rose led with a game-high 27 points while guard Chris Douglas-Roberts pitched in with 25 of his own.

And Memphis’ free-throw shooting concerns were nonexistent. The Tigers shot 26-for-35 (74.3 percent) from the charity stripe, compared to their 59.2 percentage coming into the game.

“Going into the game, all we were saying, ‘They don’t think we can make ‘em and we’re makin’ ‘em,’” Douglas-Roberts said. “I just want to know how they’ll knock on us now. We just wanted to prove that we could make them and we did.”

Out of the gate, the contest lived up to the fast-paced hype everyone said it would be — up and down with a lot of scoring.

But Memphis utterly owned that department, jumping out to a 16-6 lead in the first 5:23 before the Spartans found its only momentum of the half, responding with seven straight points from Allen and Lucas slashing the lead to just three.

Then it got ugly — or stunningly beautiful for Memphis fans.

A 34-7 Tigers slaughtering would finish off the half as MSU struggled to find high-percentage shots as well as bumping Memphis for quick fouls on the defensive end — totaling a 39.1 field-goal percentage and 10 personal fouls compared to the Tigers’ 62.5 and six.

Suton’s 11 points were the only bright statistic coming back onto the floor for 20 more minutes, as only three other Spartans scored the entire half.

But Memphis’ plus-11 rebounding advantage and early takeoff left MSU on the ground for the remainder of the game. Nothing worked to provoke a possible monumental comeback.

“We cut the lead down but it was the first half that pretty much lost us the game,” junior guard Travis Walton said. “We didn’t stick to the stuff we planned on doing and it hurt us.”