I've been a Hurricanes fan my whole life, which in Miami basketball terms mostly meant a lot of quiet, unremarkable seasons. So when 2022 happened — my senior year of high school — and the team made an Elite Eight run, it felt genuinely magical. I remember watching them compete at a level I hadn't really seen from this program before, and thinking that was probably the ceiling. A once-in-a-while kind of season you don't expect to see again for a while.
Then 2023 happened, and it was my first year as a freshman actually on campus for it, not watching from a couch somewhere. The team made the Final Four. First time in program history. I got to live that one from inside the thing instead of on the outside looking in, and it hit completely differently.
The Final Four run — first time in program history.
What I remember most isn't even a specific play. It's how it felt walking around campus during that stretch. Everybody was talking about the same thing at the same time — professors bringing it up before class, people I barely knew stopping to talk about the last game in line at the dining hall. It's a strange, good feeling when a whole school gets pulled into the same thing at once, especially somewhere like Miami where everyone's usually off doing their own thing. For a couple of weeks that spring, it felt like the entire university was one crowd.
And the team itself was part of why it worked. You could see it on the court — the chemistry, the way they played for each other instead of just next to each other. That's not something you can fake through a whole tournament run. Teams that don't actually like each other don't play like that under that kind of pressure. Watching that group compete together, trust each other with the ball in the biggest moments of their lives, was one of those things I think I'll be talking about for decades. Not because of what it means for some stat sheet, but because of what it looked like in real time — genuine brotherhood, on a court, with everything on the line.
They fell short in the end. Didn't win it all. And somehow that barely mattered to how the run felt while it was happening. Making the Final Four for the first time in program history is still enormous, especially for a program that spent so many years being an afterthought in college basketball conversations. It gave an entire school something to rally around at exactly the right time in my own life — my first year away from home, still figuring out what this place was going to be for me — and it ended up being one of the clearest memories I have of actually becoming a Miami student instead of just attending Miami.
I think that's the part that sticks with me more than the bracket or the final score. It wasn't really about basketball by the end of it. It was about a campus deciding, for a few weeks, to care about the exact same thing at the exact same time — and a team that clearly cared about each other giving everyone a real reason to.
I've thought about that run a lot since, especially now that I'm close to leaving campus for good. There's something about watching a program do something it had never done before, right as you're doing something you've never done before either — showing up somewhere new, figuring out who you are outside of high school — that makes the whole thing stick harder than it probably should. I doubt I'll remember most of my freshman-year classes in any real detail years from now. I'm pretty sure I'll still remember exactly where I was for that run.