This is an opinion column.

This is what Gene Bartow saw. This is why he left UCLA for UAB, traded John Wooden’s shadow for Paul Bryant’s and walked away from the premier college basketball program in the country at the time to start his own program from scratch in the Football Capital of the South.

He saw what we saw Sunday long before anyone had a reason to believe it, when that kind of dream looked more like hallucination than vision.

Look. Down on the court. It’s Steve Mitchell and Jerome Mincy, two Memphis kids who earned their way onto the short list of the greatest players in UAB history, waving to the crowd from center court as they and other former Blazers are recognized during a timeout.

Look. There on the sideline. It’s Andy Kennedy and Penny Hardaway, who starred in this building as players, Kennedy again and again for the home team, Hardaway once for the visitors, now coaching their alma maters in a high-wire, high-stakes game on ESPN.

Look. Up front in the student section. It’s not-so-old UAB quarterback Joe Webb swag-surfing with the future doctors and nurse practitioners the way he did as a student himself back in ‘08 when he led the chaotic postgame court storm as UAB hit the final shot to topple Derrick Rose, John Calipari and unbeaten No. 1 Memphis – except, on further review, the shot dropped a fraction of a second too late and the storm turned angry.