Two weeks ago, the NCAA Tournament started out with 68 teams, including the Oklahoma Sooners, all with the same dream of being the last team standing on Monday night and winning a national championship.
Now, we're down to just four, and on Monday night -- along with the ceremonial rendition of "One Shining Moment," the song that is ingrained with the curtain call that is the finale of the NCAA Tournament -- one team will be the only one to end the season with a win, and with it the right to call itself national champion.
Houston, Florida, Duke and Auburn compete in Final Four this weekend as Oklahoma watches
Oklahoma -- where football is king -- is not thought of as a basketball school, but the Sooners have been to five Final Fours in their history, and two national championship games. OU has never won a national championship in basketball, though, with the closest coming with Bruce Drake's 1947 Oklahoma team that lost to Holy Cross 57-48, and then again in 1988, when heavy favorite OU lost to 6-seeded Kansas, 83-79.
The Sooners, like the rest of the college basketball world, will be following the proceedings taking place in San Antonio this weekend as all four of the No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament (Auburn, Florida, Duke and Houston) will take the floor at the Alamodome with their eye on the prize.
This is just the second time in NCAA Tournament history and the first since 2008 that all four top seeds made it to the Final Four. Duke is the betting favorite to hoist the national championship trophy, but in truth, any of the four teams are capable of winning it all.
While there is no practical way of knowing which of the four teams the Oklahoma players might individually or collectively support in this weekend's championship tournament, we might be able to deduce which way Sooner Nation should lean.
It would be easy to assume that Oklahoma would favor an SEC team. A record 14 teams from the SEC were participants in this year's NCAA Tournament, and two still remain. Those two SEC finalists, however, handed the Sooners two of their worst defeats this season. Auburn defeated OU by 28 points, 98-70, as the No. 1 team in the country at the time. Two weeks later, then-No. 2 Florida beat up on the Sooners to the tune of 85-63.
Some would argue that the nature of those two conference losses, signifying how good the SEC was top to bottom in basketball this season, is precisely why the Sooners would support an SEC national champion. That last point is also why I can't imagine Oklahoma rooting for Duke, in this year or any other.
That leaves the Houston Cougars. In his eleven seasons as head coach at Houston, Kelvin Sampson has returned the Cougars to the national relevance they enjoyed in the days of Phi Slama Jama in the early 1980s. Houston is in its second season as a member of the Big 12 and won the regular-season and conference tournament titles this year with a 19-1 record. The Sooners were members of the Big 12 for 24 seasons before officially joining the SEC last summer.
As everyone with an OU affiliation or interest in Sooner sports knows, Sampson was the Oklahoma head coach for 12 seasons from 1994 to 2006 and is the second-winningest coach in OU men's basketball history. His Sooner teams were perennially recognized as some of the best in the country and made NCAA Tournament appearances in 11 of those seasons. His 2001-02 team advanced to the Final Four as a 2-seed before losing to Indiana in the national semifinals.
If that Oklahoma connection isn't enough to tilt the scale, how about this: three members of Sampson's coaching staff at Houston are former Sooner players. Former OU All-American Hollis Price is associate head coach, Quannas White is special assistant to the head coach and Sampson's son, Kellen, is an assistant head coach. Price and White played on Oklahoma's 2001-02 Final Four team.
And then there's also junior guard Milos Uzan, who is in his first season playing for Houston after spending his first two collegiate seasons as an Oklahoma Sooner under Porter Moser.
Uzan is the third-leading scorer this season for Sampson and the Cougars, averaging 11.5 per game, along with 4.4 assists.
The 6-foot-4 point guard has started all 36 games for Houston this season. Uzan scored 22 points in the Sweet 16 win over Purdue and had a season- and career-high 25 in the Big 12 championship game win over Arizona.
Although there could be some hard feelings over Sampson leaving for Indiana nearly 20 years ago and Uzan entering the transfer portal, given all of the Oklahoma ties to members of the current Houston team, it's difficult for a diehard Sooner fan to believe OU fans and even the players themselves wouldn't, at least sentimentally, be rooting for Houston to do well.
That's not the same, by the way, as picking the team you think has the best chance of winning the national championship. Las Vegas gives Houston the third-best chance of taking home the national championship trophy. But Las Vegas isn't playing in any of the games on Saturday and Monday.
Buckle up. It's going to be an exciting couple of days... from 64 down to 1.