It took the current University of Alabama freshman class a semester-and-a-half to see a Final Four. For everyone else, a lifetime.

Until Bama closed the book on Clemson in the Elite 8 out in Los Angeles, they hadn’t made a tournament semifinal since the program started more than a century ago. The second winningest program in the Southeastern Conference, with an array of legendary players and coaches, never so much as sniffed the Final Four, with just one Elite 8 to their name before getting blown out by eventual champion UConn in 2004.

One round closer to basketball heaven, the Crimson Tide men’s basketball team will face the top-seeded Huskies Saturday in Glendale, Arizona’s State Farm Stadium at 7:49 p.m. CT on TBS.

As 11.5-point underdogs, the explosive and sharp-shooting Tide don’t stand much of a chance against the reigning champs on Saturday, according to most experts. But that’s a narrative fans have heard for weeks now. Pundits have predicted Bama losses in every round, so what’s another gloomy forecast to Tuscaloosa?

“I wish we were playing anybody but UConn,” said Andalusia native and longtime fan Tom Walker. “But we’ll go and see what happens. I think we’ll be competitive and Nate Oats will have the team ready to play.”

A University of Alabama law school graduate, Walker is one of so many lifetime Crimson Tide loyalists who’ve waited many decades for this moment, and he doesn’t want it to end in the semifinal.

Perhaps always a lawyer, Walker cited impressive precedent to give Alabama more than a puncher’s chance on Saturday. “I’m hoping for UNLV in ‘91 or Kentucky in 2015 or Gonzaga two years ago,” he said. “Those teams were all ‘unbeatable,’ and two of them were undefeated and they lost in the Final Four. I’m hoping UConn finally plays a bad game.”

Breaking through

Alabama has a 62% win percentage all-time. They’ve appeared in the NCAA tournament 24 times, making 10 Sweet 16s, two Elite 8s and now one Final Four. They’ve won nine SEC tournaments and 12 regular season conference titles. Under head coaches C.M. Newton, Wimp Sanderson, Mark Gottfried and now Nate Oats, Alabama has earned an invitation to The Big Dance and even busted a move or two, but in the end, it’s the fans’ brackets that have ended up busted. Still, the Tide have a winning basketball tradition, despite public perception that football all but negates the program’s very existence.

Dick Coffee loves football, but he gives the edge to basketball as his personal favorite Tide sport, due to the rich history few appreciate enough. “It’s been a very good program, an underrated program. I don’t think people realize what a consistently good program it’s been,” Coffee said. “There have been very few down years. Other programs might have big years but they’ll have some bad years, too. But Alabama has been consistently good, maybe just not elite.”

A lifelong resident of Birmingham, Coffee continued his family’s publishing business, which his father started in 1950. He’s also president of the Birmingham Tip-Off Club.

His earliest Tide basketball memories came in the mid-1960s while listening on the radio with stars like Mike Nordholz and Bob Andrews on the court. He attended some games in Foster Auditorium before his dad bought season tickets when Coleman Coliseum (then Memorial Coliseum) opened in early 1968. Now he sits in section E, just a few rows behind the Tide bench. His mother Nora, now 96, also watches the team closely, he said, keeping score and studying the rosters.

“I bet I haven’t missed 10 home games in all that time,” he said. He also drives to nearby cities like Starkville, Oxford, Athens, Auburn and Nashville to support the team on the road. He’s attended every NCAA tournament game they’ve played in the last 40 years including trips this season to Spokane, L.A., and now Phoenix. “I’m gonna have to delay my retirement a few years to pay for all this,” Coffee said.

Andalusia native Tom Walker watched his high school basketball team play in the first state tournament held in Memorial Coliseum. A lifetime basketball fan, he began going to Alabama games during the fall semester of 1974. “I have literally been going to games for 50 years,” he said, noting he’s had season tickets since 1981 and signed up for seats in the original Tide Pride section in 1988. After graduating from law school, he took his girlfriend (whom he would later marry) to her first game in 1982, when they saw Ennis Whatley play. “She said, ‘This is great fun. I want to see more of this.’” They sit in section J, right behind the basket.

Born in Tuscaloosa and a graduate of Tuscaloosa High School in 1974, John Fraley has lived in Birmingham since 1983. He practiced law for 40 years before retiring to Mountain Brook. He enrolled at UA during the back half of the C.M. Newton era in the 1974-75 season. From that point on, he regularly attended games, transitioning into law school as well as Wimp Sanderson’s tenure. “It was pretty easy back then to love it,” Fraley said. If you’re familiar with the geography of that parking lot, when you’re in law school at Alabama, I could put my books in a locker and walk across the parking lot to the coliseum, which I did pretty much every home game.”

Fraley loves that Alabama basketball has such a different culture from football. “It’s a little more intimate with 15,000 instead of 100,000, for one thing,” he said. Seeing the same folks in the same section for decades makes for some of his favorite memories. “There’s about 20 of us maybe that have been sitting around each other for 40 years now. It’s like family, the people who sit around you.”

Jimmy Wiygul, brother-in-law to Dick Coffee, was born and raised in Birmingham. Now retired, hetransferredto UA in 1973, when he first started watching games in person and marveled at the “First Five,” the first all-Black starting lineup in school and SEC history.

That ‘76 team remains the greatest Alabama basketball team of all time, in his eyes, filled with players he’d put on his personal Tide squad Mount Rushmore: Reggie King, T.R. Dunn, Leon Douglas, and others. “I’ve always loved that team,” Wiygul said. “Those guys were like superheroes.”

The obsession set in fast. During college, Wiygul worked at the local restaurant The Pizza Villa, located on what we now call The Strip (where Rounders is today). The night Alabama played undefeated Indiana in the round of 16, he had to make pizza deliveries, which made it difficult to watch the action, especially in the days without streaming devices. During deliveries on campus, he would stop wherever they had the game on to check the score before he had to head back for more pies to move. “I sat there and watched the end of the game when we went up 69-68 and then the terrible call, the charge call on Leon Douglas. We were robbed.”

‘I’ve been waiting 60 years’

“It’s just hard to believe, I guess,” Coffee said when asked what this breakthrough means to someone who has spent so many decades waiting, cheering, stressing. He said Alabama has had more talented teams, many with draft prospects, while this year’s team currently has none projected to play in the NBA. The top overall seeded team last year with Brandon Miller. The ‘76 or ‘87 squad. Their runs fell short for various reasons, but a team who lost four of their last six games to close the regular season and flamed out in the conference tournament have nearly gone the distance. “We looked like we were going nowhere. Then to just turn it around and have contributions from such an unusual cast of characters. It’s incredibly exciting. I’ve been waiting 60 years.”

“I’m ecstatic,” Fraley said. “Maybe I should be ashamed to admit this, but I’m really surprised. There have been Alabama teams including last year where I wouldn’t have been surprised if they made the Elite 8 or Final Four, but I am surprised that this team did. Mainly because of the way we ended the year. But my feeling is it’s become starting to believe and be confident because we weren’t supposed to win against North Carolina, and we did. We certainly weren’t supposed to be in the Final Four, according to the so-called experts’ predictions and honestly according to my own expectations.”

“It just means, thematically, you never quit, you never give up. It’s possible,” Wiygul said. “It’s like the Cubs finally winning the World Series. It’s just wonderful. I think we had all learned to live with the acceptance that that may never happen. In football, it’s so successful, so great and has been for so long.”

Walker’s word: Jubilation. “Just the fact that we’ve broken through,” Walker said. “I got tired of hearing certain fans from the other part of the state saying, ‘We’ve been to a Final Four.’ Now we can say, ‘Oh really? Well, so have we.’”

For younger basketball loyalists, Oats’ winning standard inspires just as much passion for the program, particularly for Dr. Chelsea Wallace. Originally from Florence, Dr. Wallace now works as a plastic surgeon in Tuscaloosa. She enrolled at the University of Alabama during Nick Saban’s first season as the head football coach. Like most who love the Tide, started out a football fan. She and her husband moved away to Lexington, when people told them they’d have the best of both worlds: Alabama football and Kentucky basketball, what some Bama basketball fans could call their worst nightmare.

But living there had the opposite effect. “Absolutely not. I cannot cheer for the University of Kentucky,” Dr. Wallace said. “I had respect for them, but if you go to Alabama and lived in Alabama, you’re going to be an Alabama fan no matter where you are. It was always so fun in the middle of Big Blue Nation being the one person wearing a crimson shirt in a sea of blue.”

Their time in Kentucky overlapped with the beginning of Nate Oats’ coaching tenure in Tuscaloosa, igniting their love of Tide hoops. So living in a city and community that was so basketball-focused did have its perks, forging die-hard fans, albeit for the school in Tuscaloosa. Soon enough, they moved home and bought season tickets for the foreseeable future.

During the 2023-24 season, the Wallaces committed to going to as many of the Tide’s away games as they could. They traveled up to Toronto to watch them lose a heartbreaker to Purdue. They go to most SEC road games. They even made a pact to celebrate their 10th wedding wedding anniversary by watching in person any NCAA tournament games Alabama played to end the season, which meant celebrating their marriage in Spokane, Washington, where Bama eliminated Charleston and Grand Canyon on their way to a Sweet 16 berth.

Following the win over Clemson, they beat the team back to Tuscaloosa National Airport, where a crowd of hundreds greeted the team. “We pulled up as that plane landed. I felt just so happy for them. That stretch of games, towards the end, it hurt my heart to see those guys not smiling,” Dr. Wallace said. “To see them land and be greeted and just beaming, aw man, it made everybody’s heart happy to see them have success and enjoy it and get the reception they deserved.”

While she grew up an Alabama fan, she didn’t have many chances to see many games in person. But her house would turn on the television, turn off the sound and turn on the radio when possible.

That intimacy translates to what you see on the court, Dr. Wallace said. “You can sit there and see the guys working hard, see the emotion of the game,” she said. “When you realize these are great guys, great kids, it’s just so fun to be somebody who is there to support them and can cheer them on. You don’t get that in football. There’s a helmet. You can’t see the emotion. You’re so close to the court. It’s a game where you can physically see the hard work on the court.”

You can’t call the Wallaces “FOGs,” or “Football-Only Gumps,” as some superfans label Tide fans who they insist only care about one program. In addition to basketball and football, they support baseball, gymnastics, softball and more. But their road trips are reserved for basketball.

‘I’ve let out a deep breath’

Conventional wisdom among even the most passionate Tide fans heading into the weekend: They didn’t think they’d make it this far. Everything from here on is “gravy.” Few Alabamians would turn their noses up at gravy, but since the Tide have arrived at the mountaintop, Coffee wants it all. “Now that we’re here, and everybody thinks we have no chance, the whole country is expecting a blowout, but Connecticut lost some games this year, so it could happen,” he said. “We’re capable of getting red-hot. I’m certainly hopeful.”

It isn’t just gravy for Walker. He wants the W. “I’ve always been of the belief if you’re going to have a team, you might as well have a good team and do your best to win championships,” he said. “I think we’ve finally got a coach who believes that.”

“My attitude going into Monday night is, ‘Hey, you never know.’ It could happen. If this team heats up and especially if we can hit outside shots on a consistent basis, it’s possible we can beat UConn (on Saturday),” Fraley said.

Lamenting how close Alabama came to immortality, the fans speed through other teams that tasted greatness: The ‘86-87 team who lost to Providence in the Sweet 16, Mark Gottfried’s Elite 8 run with Chuck Davis and Kennedy Winston, and most recently the Brandon Miller run that ended abruptly.

“I never expected this to happen. I guess I’d grown up thinking that’s just not meant to be,” Wiygul said. “We should be happy with the Sweet 16, and it’s great we can win the conference championship.” But he said this run has almost given him a new perspective on life. “I’m sure every old-timer would tell you it’s just really a wonderful thing because we’ve been so close and never been able to break through.”

They’re only following the lead of their head coach. “I’m not going into this game just happy to be here,” Oats said during a Thursday press conference.

After the trip to Los Angeles to see them dispatch North Carolina and Clemson, a recent risk paid off. “Maybe I’m just a crazy fan, but I bought my tickets to Phoenix on March 1st,” Dr. Wallace said. “So I was like, you know what? I feel good about it. I’m glad I did it, because they were a lot cheaper than they are now.”

Dr. Wallace said they believed this team always had potential to make a run. The roster has too much talent. “Having watched them since day one, you always knew there was a spark. It was going to happen at some point,” she said. While the SEC tournament didn’t have the outcome anyone wanted, seeing the team power through the opening two rounds thanks to help from unlikely heroes impressed the Wallaces. “I just never really felt like we can’t do this. It just always seemed so possible and still does, just seeing how that spark has still happened. It’s been really fun,” she said.

As satisfying as a Final Four run must be for such an ardent supporter all these years, Dr. Wallace really wants it for the players. “I’m just so proud for those guys. I guess you can think about what it means to you as a fan, but at the end of the day I’m just so proud of them,” she said. “To see the depths of the low points of the season, and then to have some criticism, warranted or unwarranted, however you want to look at it, to rise above and embrace the mudita mindset [the Dharmic concept of the joy one feels for another’s good fortune and accomplishments, a phrase shared by UA softball coach Patrick Murphy]. Yes, I’m obviously happy as a fan, but honestly I’m just really proud of that set of guys. It just makes you happy. I find greater joy in seeing them succeed and to all be smiling at the end of the game.”

Walker will travel to Phoenix to see his and the Tide’s first Final Four in person. “I wasn’t going to,” he said. “My wonderful wife said Saturday night and a couple of people called and said ‘Hey, let’s go.’ She looked at me and said, ‘You’ve been waiting for this for 68 years. You need to go.’ She’s great.”

Wiygul can’t make the trip. With his wife visiting their son out of town, he’s home taking care of their pets. “Those inconveniences of life like marriage and family,” he jokes.

He doesn’t take it for granted, especially as a Crimson Tide fan who has witnessed so much winning outside of basketball, until now. serendipity of witnessing not one but two generational head coaches usher in separate golden eras has spoiled the fan base. But after decades of investing so much time, money and hope into the other sport long overshadowed by football? “It’s just great and joyful,” Wiygul said. “There are bigger things in life than sports, but we latch on to sports teams and it’s just great to see that success. I’ve let out a deep breath. It can be done.”