The ex-student manager stood quietly by himself, hand in one pocket, wearing his new national championship cap backward, eyes fixed on a distant Lucas Oil Stadium scoreboard. Dusty May let One Shining Moment flow over him on this, one of the nights of his life.
They had done it, his Michigan Wolverines. All those transfers, who had been pieced together into a force for which no one had an answer. Not even hard-to-kill Connecticut, the program with the magical past. All those talented Michigan newcomers, convinced they’d be better together, glued into an often terrifying whole.
“We’re all underdogs, castoffs to a certain extent,” May said, “We have an incredibly talented group, but we all haven’t taken the easy road here. I think we all respect each other’s journey, and we respect each other for our positives and negatives. I’ve never seen a group that was open and honest about how they loved each other.”
So said the man who built a national champion in his second season in Ann Arbor, this Bob Knight student manager who had come out of small-town southern Indiana, not 70 miles away from the podium where they handed him the trophy Monday night. The year before he arrived at Michigan, the Wolverines had gone 8-24.
No wonder, then, what the man not far away in the middle of a bunch of celebrating Wolverines fans had just said. Warde Manuel is the director of athletics at Michigan. The question was put to him: Was Dusty May his best hire ever?
“Tonight? Hell, yeah. Absolutely.”
In the end, this was so textbook 2026. Bring in new faces from many places, not only with staggering size and lavish talent but an understanding of what it takes to be a team – and even more important, the willingness to do it. Add in a sprinkling of holdovers who didn’t mind giving up playing time. Have a determined, organized coach with a lot of ideas at the top to push the right buttons. Put all that in the hot Big Ten oven for a couple of months to properly bake until March.
Look what came out Monday night. One shining maize and blue moment.
Michigan’s 37-year wait for its next national championship, over. The Big Ten’s 26-year-old title dry spell snapped – the night after the UCLA women had done the same to the league's 27-year drought in that sport. May’s plans, validated as he became a championship coach in his home state. Connecticut’s perfect 6-0 record in title games stained. All products of the Wolverines' 69-63 victory that came with plenty of defense, sweat, toil and tears – but not many outside shots.
👉Check out the final moments & celebration from Michigan's titleThis was a night that had to be won amid the banging bodies inside. Michigan is national champion today despite going 2-for-15 in 3-pointers. But there was that 36-22 gap in points in the paint. The muscle neighborhood.
“We’ve been finding ways to get wins like this all year,” Yaxel Lendeborg was saying.
That’s exactly the message May gave his players late in the game, when the shots still weren’t falling, and Connecticut was making its run, cutting an 11-point lead to four.
“We won games where it was a 3-point battle, we won games where we can’t hit,” Roddy Gayle Jr. said. “He just reiterated to us we find a way to win here at Michigan.”
The most obvious narrative about these Wolverines is clear enough. Behold the power of the portal. All five starters are transfers, four arriving this season. The year before, even May was a transfer of sorts, from Florida Atlantic. A team of the modern age, light years from the Fab Five, who all showed up in Ann Arbor in 1991 as freshmen. Another century, another universe.
And yet to dismiss what happened Monday night as simply an accumulation of someone else’s recruits misses a very large point.
“When you bring a group this talented together, and they decide from the beginning that they're going to do it this way and they never waver and they never change, that's probably the most uncommon thing in athletics now,” May said. “And it's a tribute to their character, but also those in their circles around them, their coaches, their parents, their mentors. They allowed these guys to give themselves up for the group, and it's never guaranteed, but for these guys to cut down the nets after all they've sacrificed is pretty special.”
That was something even Monday night’s victim understood.
“It was a beautifully constructed roster,” UConn Dan Hurley had said the day before. And he was still convinced 24 hours later. “They're legit. They definitely deserved to win the national championship. They're clearly the best team in the country this year.”
That was on display Monday night, not so much with grandeur but grit. When Elliot Cadeau gave the Wolverines their biggest lead yet at 48-37, it was with Michigan’s first 3-pointer of the night, in the 28th minute. Until then, the Wolverines were 0-for-10. The assists were not coming by the bushel as customary, the offense was not a bonfire. But they had owned the paint 28-16.
It would be a grind to the finish line, Connecticut too proud and too well-versed in April basketball to easily give. This may have been the most fitting way for the Wolverines to clinch. After all the dominant joyrides this season, they had to finish the job with elbow grease, and against a giant of March who was resolute enough to hold a team that had scored at least 90 points in every NCAA Tournament game to 69, and 38 percent shooting.
“It’s an honor to be able to get this win,” Lendeborg said.
They’ve heard the things said about their transfer influx, by voices alarmed at the ways of the new world. “We took four guys out of the portal,” May said about this season. “If you listen to the college basketball gospel, we took 17 of them.”
They heard those echoes Monday night.
“They might still be calling us mercenaries, (but) we’re the hardest playing team in college basketball,” Lendeborg said, “We’re the best team in college basketball, and we're gonna be one of the greatest ever.”
Ever? The 37-3 final record is impressive enough, but maybe he meant the best Michigan team ever. About that, he said, “I’m waiting for the Fab Five to give us their approval. If they do, let it be said we’re the best team ever.”
👀 WATCH: Michigan vs UConn national championship highlights
The 1989 national champion Wolverines might want a word or two about that, but there is no doubt this team is in the top Michigan tier. And there is no doubt that this was more than stockpiling bodies and sending them out to conquer. Cadeau, the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player, from North Carolina. Lendeborg from UAB, Morez Johnson Jr. from Illinois, Aday Mara from UCLA. They had to learn what they could do en masse.
“I just saw so much talent around me since day one,” Cadeau said. “Just like a unique set of talent, like three bigs at the same time, switching 1 through 4. I just saw a unique type of basketball that we were playing, and I knew it would be a mismatch nightmare for every single team that we played, and it was.”
If the Michigan Formula is largely seen as a gushing transfer spigot, it must also be recognized for how well and how quickly the talent melded together. Because lots of places try this, and it doesn’t work so well. Lendeborg was talking on Monday about the players already here before the new wave arrived this season.
“They tucked us in under their wing and showed us the Michigan way. They could have easily got hurt or something because the new guys were coming in, stealing their minutes, stealing their points, but they didn't care. All they cared about was winning, and look where it led us.”
Trey McKenney was giving his freshman view: “I've never been around such a talented group of guys that are willing to take a lesser role for somebody next to them.”
May was telling a story from some shaky early showings this season, before anyone had a clue about what was brewing in Ann Arbor.
“At that point, we considered pivoting and changing our lineup and going in a different direction and maybe admitting failure for our vision. I remember the day like it was yesterday, we were in the conference room, and we did a deep dive in everything that you could come up with to try to predict whether we thought it would work. Once we left that meeting, we were more committed than ever that this is going to work, and these are the reasons why.
“We didn't feel like the bamboo was just going to shoot to the sky the next week in Vegas, but it did.”
That’s when the Wolverines put on a shocking three-day stampede of 40 points over San Diego State, 30 over Auburn and 40 over Gonzaga. Soon after came other thrashings: Rutgers by 41, Villanova by 28, USC by 30. What monster was lurking out there in Michigan? The Wolverines were in the national spotlight to stay.
“I think the most rewarding part is they never changed,” May said. “That's typically when it gets more difficult. I've been an assistant on staffs when you play like that, that's when it really gets tough because there's more attention, there's more of everything coming at your guys, and for them not to waver on how they continued to give, to me that's probably the hardest part.”
The irony is that while all those blowouts drove Michigan up the polls – not to mention how the recent routs of Tennessee and Arizona catapulted the Wolverines to Monday night -- it was a more get-your-hands-dirty game that pushed them over the top.
“This whole year we were a team that played together,” Lendeborg said. “We didn’t have a best player, we had a guy that steps up big time in each game. We have players that make plays when they need to make them.”
Monday night was an example. Lendeborg, the Big Ten’s Player of the Year, had to fight to have much of an impact because of knee and ankle issues. He scored 13 hard points, but his game was muted, as was his post-game celebration. “I tried to show I was excited and I was happy,” he said. “But I couldn’t do too much jumping around,”
Others made the big plays, and also the jumping around.
Back in Ann Arbor, only one championship banner hangs in Crisler Center and May related how, “if we were having a bad practice or we didn't have our edge, we would remind them that if we were ever going to hang another banner so that one has some company, then we can't have these type of days or these type of practices,.”
“Usually, that was one way we could refocus our group.”
A year ago, this Wolverines roster was spread all over the map. Monday night, they stood together, all of them beneath the same confetti shower. From the Elite Eight on, they had led for nearly 104 of the 120 minutes and never trailed by more than three points. It was never as easy as it sometimes looked, but now they are legends at home and an example in their sport.
Because a good many coaches will now gaze across the portal landscape, wondering if they, too, can be Michigan. If they can be that ex-student manager with his championship cap backward. “I think he recruits personalities overall,” Gayle said. “That’s what you see.”
🎮
📚 HISTORY: Title winners | MOP winners | Most tournament titles
