Welcome back. For those who spent spring break hiking through
Australia’s outback without so much as access to a pay phone,
there’s only one thing you need to know about tonight.
It should be your most memorable college experience.
UCLA is playing Florida for the NCAA men’s basketball
national championship, and while I’d like to put that in
perspective, this newspaper simply doesn’t have the
space.
For anyone who has ever camped outside Pauley Pavilion or simply
donned a Den T-shirt, it’s pretty easy to understand why
tonight’s game is the biggest event to hit campus since,
well, the last time the Bruins won the title 11 years ago.
A national championship in college basketball is rarer than an
easy engineering course and more coveted than a 1945 bottle of La
Tache Burgundy.
Consider this.
There are 334 Division I programs that entertain thoughts of a
national championship each year, yet the Bruins are now just one of
two teams actually competing for it.
There are approximately 17 million students currently enrolled
in American colleges, meaning UCLA students represent just one
quarter of 1 percent who might revel in their school’s
title.
“This is the biggest stage at the collegiate level,”
senior guard Cedric Bozeman said. “That doesn’t just
always go for us, it goes for the fans who have been a part of
this, especially those that have been with us from the first round
until now.”
Some sports fans would give half their limbs and two of their
paychecks to be in an environment like Westwood tonight. For UCLA
students, it’s simply a matter of returning from spring break
on time.
Just how big of an event is this game for UCLA’s
campus?
For the Catholic Students Association, it would trump the
Pope’s arrival for a Sunday mass.
For the Bruin Republicans, it’d rank right up there with
the rebirth of Ronald Reagan in his soon-to-be namesake
hospital.
And for Amnesty International, it’d be the equivalent of
eliminating all the human rights violations during an informal
get-together in Royce Hall.
“It’s my first year and my first everything.
It’s supposed to be a learning year,” freshman forward
Alfred Aboya said. “To play for a national championship is a
dream come true.”
It’s impossible to appreciate the significance of
tonight’s game without understanding the context. At a school
with the most legendary stature in college basketball, UCLA has
been a footnote’s footnote recently.
Just over a decade ago, basketball-crazed students enrolled at
UCLA with visions of the 1995 national championship still fresh in
their mind. What they ended up seeing was arguably the
school’s most embarrassing loss the following year in a
first-round NCAA defeat to Princeton.
Four years ago, avid fans were attracted to UCLA and the
program’s consistent influx of talented players. What they
witnessed was the dismissal of the head coach and two of the worst
seasons in the program’s history.
Only the current batch of seniors was around for both those
years, and let me tell you, that period made me want to 8-clap my
hands over my eyes.
This current team’s restoration of the program in such a
short period has been nothing short of miraculous.
Win or lose, it will permanently have a proud and unique place
in this school’s rich history.
That’s why, as students, you’ll always remember
where you were for tonight’s game.
The memories of tonight will certainly last longer than your
21st birthday or any graduation speech.
Every student goes through those things. Tonight is what makes
it so special to be at UCLA.
Finley was a 2005-2006 basketball columnist who plans on
sending Ben Howland a personal thank you note. E-mail him at
afinley@media.ucla.edu with any comments you’d like him to
pass along to the Bruin coach.