While the Connecticut Huskies have been a wagon in their quest to repeat as the national champion of men's college basketball, the Purdue Boilermakers remain on quite the train track to a redemption story that would have been unfathomable if it hadn't already happened just a half-decade ago.
At this time last year, this team was still licking its wounds after falling flat on its face in a stunning first-round loss to No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson. But just like the Virginia Cavaliers from five years prior—who leveraged the motivation from a historic loss to UMBC to turn around and win the first natty in program history—here are the Boilermakers, still dancing into the Final Four, on the verge of officially turning UVA's miraculous coincidence into a trend.