The Athletic has live coverage of UConn vs. Illinois in men’s March Madness Elite 8 play.
MINNEAPOLIS — The seconds ticked away and Terrence Shannon Jr. smiled, maybe for the first time all week on this floor, and held aloft an index finger as he walked slowly up the floor. His Illinois teammate Luke Goode eventually crowded his space with a chest bump. We did it, Shannon told him, and this part actually has never been the problem. It’s finding a way to fill the empty space that’s followed.
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A 93-87 win over Wisconsin at Target Center meant the second-seeded Illini had their fourth Big Ten tournament championship in their eighth appearance in the final game. There is no doubting the potency of the offense. There is no doubting the resolve since this was the third straight game in which Illinois faced a double-digit second-half deficit and won. The ability to put the ball through the rim, combined with the inability to believe you’ll ever stop doing so, is a dangerous cocktail indeed.
“We’re playing great,” Illinois coach Brad Underwood told CBS reporter Tracy Wolfson as confetti fell to the floor. “To come here and beat the best teams in college basketball, I feel great.”
And now comes the hard part. Now comes finding a way to throw a bridge across the chasm from here to there.
Illinois has not reached the Sweet 16 since 2005. In recent years, the roster has featured some of the best talent to walk through Champaign maybe ever, and certainly in a very long time. Nothing but NCAA Tournament failings have followed. Second-round losses in 2021 and 2022 — and it’s worth noting that the ’21 exit followed another successful run through the conference tournament bracket. Last year, it was a first-round departure. Underwood and his staff have brought in stars. And they have fallen.
All that’s left to wonder is whether this three-game run has turned this group into something different.
“We’re going in … as healthy as we’ve been and we’re playing well,” Underwood said. “I’m here to try and win a national championship. Illinois is that type of program. That’s our goal. It’s not to get out of the first weekend. It’s to keep moving on.”
Ohio State had the Illini where it wanted them. Same for Nebraska. Didn’t matter. Wisconsin had a 10-point lead with more than 14 minutes to go Sunday. It was gone, and then some, in less than 5 1/2 minutes of game time. Shannon’s ability to put pressure on the rim and his big-play ability on both ends — he hit the go-ahead 3-pointer with a minute and a half left, then picked up a steal on Wisconsin’s ensuing possession and hit two more free throws — is one thing. But there’s too much variety for most teams to handle. It was Dain Dainja one game here in Minnesota. It was, honestly, pretty much just Shannon and his record-breaking 40-point outburst the next. On Sunday, first-team All-Big Ten guard Marcus Domask finally played like it here, with a very complete 26-point, eight-assist, seven-rebound effort.
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“There were a lot of times it would’ve been really easy to fold and pack it up and accept defeat,” Domask said. “But every time out, we had the same message: We weren’t going home.”
It’s clearly enough to be very bullish about the prospects of a team bound for a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament field. It has to be enough to win games now, or all of this is just a prelude to the past.
Handed the microphone to address the crowd after the championship, Underwood asked everyone left to join him in a team tradition: a big, collective stomp to put the exclamation on a championship. Illinois hopes everything that’s come before was somewhere underfoot.
(Photo of Terrence Shannon Jr.: David Berding / Getty Images)