SAN ANTONIO — They say everything is bigger in Texas, and that includes the tall tales, some so high they are out of reach.

A Michigan team attempting to spin one of the greatest championship yarns in modern college basketball history tumbled hard in a 79-62 loss to Villanova in Monday night’s national title game.

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Given a snowball’s chance on a south Texas afternoon by the chattering hoops classes, those odds ultimately proved kind.

Michigan had no answer for out-of-this-planet reserve Donte DiVincenzo, national player of the year Jalen Brunson, and the closest thing this sport has had in recent years to a super team.

WATCH: Moe Wagner talks about Michigan’s second-half troubles

The Wolverines needed to play a flawless game to compete, and they didn’t come anywhere close. Villanova had too much firepower, including its ice-blooded redhead off the bench.

How deep is this Wildcats team? Conjuring flashes of Luke Hancock — the former unsung Louisville forward and current financial adviser who seared Michigan in the 2013 title game — DiVincenzo came off the bench to blister the Wolverines like nobody had this season. Raining in one 3 after another, he had 18 points in the first half and finished with 31 points, sending even the neutral observers at the Alamodome into a full-throated delirium.

“Even if we had played our best, it would have been very difficult to win that game with what DiVincenzo did,” Michigan coach John Beilein said. “Incredible performance. Sometimes those individual performances just beat you, and you just take your hat off and say, ‘Good game. We played you the best we could, and tonight you were better than us.’”

And so there was no shame, of course, for this Michigan team that began the season unranked — tucked between Maryland and Ball State among those also receiving votes — and became greater than the sum of its unheralded parts, giving everything until the end.

Nobody was beating this Villanova team.

Although I picked Villanova, sure, you wondered if Michigan could somehow find a way — somehow deliver John Beilein his first championship — as it had without fail the past seven weeks. But Villanova, of course, was like no one it had played.

For as incongruous as it felt to cast Michigan — the university with a $163 million athletics budget and a $10.9 billion endowment — as no match for the small Catholic college from Philadelphia, it was the truth.

Villanova was not just good. It was perhaps all-time good.

In 1985, Rollie Massimino’s eighth-seeded Wildcats shot 78.6 percent against powerhouse Georgetown in a championship upset famously remembered as “The Perfect Game.” Lately, it felt like they played one every night, beating every team in March by double digits.

They had it all, with star guards — Brunson and future lottery pick Mikal Bridges — chaperoning the greatest show on wood. Villanova zipped the ball around the perimeter as if it was a flat iron and shot it as if stuck in heat-check mode, hitting an NCAA-record 454 3s this season at a more accurate clip than the Golden State Warriors.

In the semifinal, the Wildcats broke the record for 3-pointers in a Final Four game ... in the first minute of the second half. They cruised to a 95-79 purge of top-seeded Kansas, their ninth straight March win by double digits.

WATCH: Jordan Poole says it’s tough losing in the championship game

In short, the latest — and best — Wildcats team in a five-year run of them that had produced 163 wins and a national title looked unstoppable.

Michigan, meanwhile, had won 14 straight but with the same underdog edge that sustained its out-of-nowhere success last March, too.

The narrative Monday was easy. Flash vs. grind. The sublime offense and the debonair coach vs. the crunching defense and, well, Columbo.

“At the end of the game,” Beilein cracked beforehand, “Jay [Wright] will still look like George Clooney, and I will look like Columbo by Peter Falk. I’d like to say Kevin Costner, but I can’t go there.”

Like the astute, blue-collar detective, though, Beilein and Michigan generally had the answers. 

And early Monday, the coach — in pursuit of his first national title — looked like he might yet have something up his rolled-up sleeve.

Moe Wagner got anything he wanted early while the Wolverines defended like crazy, switching every screen, denying, and raising havoc, opening a 21-14 lead. 

But Villanova stirred, then exploded, and just like that, it was over, hysteria for Villanova, sadness for Michigan, the tall tale of a lifetime proving far out of reach. 

“That’s a very sad locker room right now,” Beilein said, “not because we lost the game, but because they know something special just ended.”

Contact David Briggs at dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084, or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.

First Published April 3, 2018, 4:06 a.m.