Maryland men’s basketball celebrates 20th anniversary of lone national title: ‘We will always be connected’

They had seen each other in various combinations over the previous two decades, at a 15th-anniversary celebration and most recently when Steve Blake was inducted to the Maryland Sports Hall of Fame last fall.

This was special though, probably the first time they had all gathered since they won the only men’s basketball national championship in Maryland history.

“We haven’t seen Ryan Randle in 20 years,” coach Gary Williams said Sunday, nodding to the beefy former power forward sitting a few tables away. “He’s been down in Texas hiding on us. He’s hard to hide, too. But it’s just great to see guys, how they’re right into being a roommate again, how they’re right into being [in the] same seat on the bus when we went out to dinner last night. It’s really weird. I even sat in the same seat.”

Twenty years after they beat Indiana in the NCAA final, Williams and his players from the 2001-02 team returned to College Park in advance of Sunday’s game against No. 22 Ohio State to celebrate what they had accomplished as a group. They grew up together, learning painful lessons when they squandered a 22-point lead to Duke in the 2001 Final Four. By the time they fought back to the biggest stage in college basketball, all the pieces of their puzzle fit perfectly.

“We accomplished something 20 years ago that will never be forgotten; no other Maryland team has done it,” said Juan Dixon, the leading scorer on the 2002 team and Most Outstanding Player in that year’s NCAA tournament. “Starting with our leader, Coach Williams, who believed in all of us. All of us had a defined role that we needed to execute, and we did that in 2002. Everyone was a star in their roles, and the bond that I built with my guys … we will always be connected by what we accomplished.”

He recalled how he felt compelled to speak loudest in the huddle when the Terps fell behind 13-2 in the semifinal round against fellow No. 1 seed Kansas. “I needed to let guys hear my passion and my urgency,” Dixon said. “I just had the mindset that we weren’t going to lose.”

They didn’t; Dixon scored a game-high 33-points as the Terps outlasted the Jayhawks, 97-88. Such memories hung in the air Sunday as the players and Williams met up, many of them carrying a few extra pounds and flanked by children and spouses.

The scoreboards in the auxiliary gym at Xfinity Center, where the players gathered for a pregame reception, read “Md. 64, Ind. 52″, the final in the Terps’ national championship victory in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome. The time read “20:02″, commemorating the year when it all went down.

They took the court to loud cheers during a timeout in the first half of Maryland’s game against Ohio State. Students wore white commemorative T-shirts; other fans showed up in Dixon’s old No. 3 jersey.

This year’s Terps will likely join the long list of Maryland teams that have not gotten back to the Final Four. As that 2002 triumph recedes further into the past, the enormity of the achievement grows in the minds of those who pulled it off.

Williams knew how rare it was at the time. He was a college head coach for 33 years, won 668 games and made the Final Four exactly twice.

“It’s not just having really good players,” he said. “Everything has to go right for you. People say, ‘Oh, it’s only six games.’ But you’re playing the best teams in the country those six games, so if a guy sprains an ankle the day before in a shoot-around, you don’t win. So you understand that, but at the same time, these guys probably thought they were good enough from 2001. They had the confidence that they were good enough.”

The wins mattered, of course, but it’s the camaraderie that brings grins to their faces and quips to their tongues when they reconnect in the same room.

“Just the conversations, catching up with where their lives are at, meeting their families, it’s special,” Blake, the team’s point guard, said. “Our personalities have not changed much at all. We might act a little bit more mature around the spouses, but if we get by ourselves, all the little jokes and old stuff comes right back.”

Center Lonny Baxter, the second-leading scorer and leading rebounder on the 2002 team, joked that his back-to-the-basket game probably would not have a place in 2022. But he knows nothing will knock his Maryland team from its prominent place in the state’s basketball lore.

“Me being from the state of Maryland, that national championship means everything,” he said. “To come in — a bunch of unknown guys, none of us high-profile players — and beat all the teams that we beat and leave as national champions, it was the greatest four years of my life.”