When a No. 8 seed makes a run to the Final Four, improbable events need to occur for that team to find unexpected glory. Opponents need to be off their game, true, but the lower-seeded team has to put the pieces together. It has to find even better solutions to problems and crises. It has to inspire the best performances from players who might not have previously known they had the ability to achieve so richly.
On Sunday in the Kohl Center, the 2000 Wisconsin Badgers men’s basketball team was honored in the 20th anniversary season of their march to the Final Four in Indianapolis. The Final Four berth was Wisconsin’s first since 1941. It well and fully ushered in this golden era of Badger basketball, putting the program on the national map and convincing in-state players UW was a place where their talents could be cultivated to great effect. The 2000 Final Four run was — and is, and will always be — a seminal moment in Wisconsin sports history.
It needed players such as Roy Boone to make it happen.
Boone, pictured in the cover photo for this story (at a press conference in the Kohl Center before Sunday’s game against Ohio State), chose the perfect day to play a great game. He had been averaging close to six points per game entering the West Regional final in Albuquerque against Purdue. Boone could have remained in obscurity or wilted under pressure, but instead, he grew taller in the cauldron of the Elite Eight, regarded by most (if not all) coaches as the toughest game to coach and win, far more than the national championship game.
Boone scored 12 huge points. He scored six points in the final three minutes of regulation. He made four free throws in the closing 68 seconds of a game the Badgers won by four points, 64-60.
Listen to the airtight confidence in Boone’s words after that win, 20 years ago:
“When they fouled me down the stretch, it dawned on me we were going to the Final Four.”
When Wisconsin was denied a national title in 2015, a then-obscure role player named Grayson Allen rose from nowhere to lead a Duke rally. (That was the last night Grayson Allen was obscure.) NCAA Tournament history is filled with unlikely stories of players who emerged from the shadows to make a defining difference in a Final Four or national title run.
Roy Boone was that player for the 2000 Wisconsin Badgers. The moment might have found him more than the other way around, but when the moment did find him, Roy Boone was found to be prepared.