NCAA Basketball: Revisiting the Dream Seasons of 2020; Four Years Later

Throughout February 2020, the term "dream season" probably became overused, thanks to Dayton, Baylor and San Deigo St spending the home stretch of the season in competition for each school's first ever NCAA Tournament #1 seed. These three were the talk of the sport, a rare chance to center the conversation around programs that weren't often seen by the casual fan until March. They were the byproducts of an abnormal season that saw many of the sport's most legendary programs never challenge for a top five spot. North Carolina even finished the year under .500, the only time that ever happened to Roy Williams in his thirty-three years as a head coach.

We all know what happened next, the NCAA Tournament never happened, depriving fans of the greatest weekend in sports and keeping dozens of players from a lone chance to experience it. Although in hindsight, most of the stars on the best teams had played in the year before or ended up doing so the year after, with the glaring exceptions of Dayton's National Player of the Year Obi Toppin and Kentucky's freshmen backcourt of Immanuel Quickley and Tyrese Maxey.

The basketball-less months that followed became a referendum of what could have been for around a hundred programs that still had a reasonable hope of glory on March 11th. For fanbases of plenty of schools having strong seasons, like Michigan St, Duke, Villanova and Wisconsin, it faded away as a simple lost opportunity, no different than a year that ended in an early upset loss. But for about a dozen of these schools, it was hard to let go of what truly could have been a "dream season."

So in the three and a half seasons that have followed, what happened to those programs? They quickly took divergent paths to pain or glory, a split no more evident that what's happened to the AP poll #3 and #5 ranked teams at the end of 2020, Baylor won a national title thirteen months later; Dayton has yet to play so much as an NCAA Tournament game.

Just about all of the major players from 2020 are long gone from college basketball. Some of the coaches have moved on as well. But the fans are largely the same. So I've divided those teams that may have been in the midst of dream seasons into five separate categories as to how the dreams of February/early March 2020 should still linger amidst the hearts of their fans.

*All tournament seed projections come from ESPN's Joe Lunardi's final 2020 Bracketology