ESPN Men's Basketball

Jim Calhoun remembers fondly the last time Washington was relevant in the NCAA Tournament.

He was there, watching Rip Hamilton deliver a game-winning shot at the buzzer to give Connecticut a 75-74 victory over Washington and former coach Bob Bender in the Sweet 16 of the 1998 NCAA Tournament.

The Huskies moved on to play North Carolina, losing in the Elite Eight to Antawn Jamison, Vince Carter & Co. in Greensboro, N.C. UConn went on the next season to win the national title. The Huskies won it all again last April.

Washington wasn't the same until 2004, when it reinvented itself under new coach Lorenzo Romar, high-flying guard Nate Robinson and productive trench player Brandon Roy. The Huskies are now in position to get to the Final Four for the first time since 1953 after receiving a No. 1 seed in the Albuquerque Regional.

What happened since that one shot?

Plenty.

"That was their last big surge," Calhoun said of Washington in the NCAA Tournament. "That game helped us because it put us in position to play a great Carolina team [UNC lost to Utah in the national semifinals]. We lost, but it showed we were close to being very, very good.

"That Washington game took us one more step," the UConn coach said. "We had been in an Elite Eight before, but that game pushed us into a game against a team that we thought could win the championship. When we got on the bus after that North Carolina game, we thought we could be back here next year. Had Rip missed that shot we might not have been able to say that."

That could be true, but Connecticut still would have been an elite team in 1999. The Huskies' core returned, with Hamilton being joined by Khalid El-Amin, Ricky Moore, Kevin Freeman and Jake Voskuhl.

The impact on Washington was more pronounced.

The Huskies from the Northwest still reached the NCAAs in 1999 as a No. 7 seed but lost in the first round to Miami-Ohio. Gone from the Sweet 16 team was big man Patrick Femerling, a three-year contributor who abruptly left in July to play in his native Germany. Still, Todd MacCulloch was back for his senior season with fellow senior Donald Watts.

The glory days would end after 1999 for Bender. Dan Dickau transferred to Gonzaga and eventually became an All-American. The Huskies won only 10 games in 1999-2000. The slide continued in 2000-01 (again only 10 wins), and Bender was out after winning just 11 games in 2001-02. Romar, after six years at Pepperdine and Saint Louis, was his replacement.

"Sometimes you have bad luck and it's hard to recover," Romar said of the last few seasons of the Bender era. "They warmed the seat for us. They went to the Sweet 16 and then back to the NCAAs, so they temporarily awakened this town [to college basketball]. Before that, it hadn't been since 1984, '85 and '86. They picked up a bit of that swagger and left it for us."

But what was the perception of the Huskies when Romar took over? Not good. That's why it took Roy and Robinson, even though he was initially a football player, to take a chance on staying home in Seattle to turn the program around.

"The perception was that Washington was never on TV and doesn't send a lot of guys to the pros like Arizona," Roy said. "I don't think Jason Terry and Jamal Crawford [both from the Seattle area] trusted their careers in the hands of Washington at the time. I thought, 'Why not start here at home?'

"To do this, we had to get the guys to stay home and mix it with some good hustle guys like Bobby Jones [from Compton] and shooters like Tre Simmons [Seattle]," Roy said. "This is the second full year that we've had our whole team together since I came in late my freshman year and Nate did, too, so it just took us longer to put it together. We were talking about it but no one believed it."

Romar said the toughest challenge was to create a culture in Seattle for college hoops. There was a hiccup when the Huskies were cited for recruiting violations two years ago, but that didn't deter them. It was more of a humbling experience for Romar and an overzealous assistant, Cameron Dollar, who was visiting recruits during dead recruiting periods.

"We believe we are a group that has integrity, and mistakes were made that we learned from," Romar said. "We moved on and most of us have put that behind us."

The aggressive mind-set in recruiting translated onto the court, where the Huskies played a style of taking the game at an opponent instead of passively waiting for a play to develop.

The play-at-warp-speed philosophy led the Huskies to a remarkable turnaround last season, rallying from an 0-5 Pac-10 start to a 12-6 second-place finish and, ultimately, a three-game sweep of Arizona. The 19-12 record was good enough for a No. 8 seed – their first NCAA bid since '99.

Washington lost to UAB in the 8-9 game but was determined to return this season as a potential Final Four favorite.

Before this season started, the Huskies corralled perhaps their greatest recruiting class ever – headlined by potential high school All-Americans Martell Webster and Jon Brockman, two Seattle-area natives who could compete for national freshman of the year honors next season.

Once the season started, the Huskies lived up to expectations early, winning the Great Alaska Shootout with wins over Utah, Oklahoma and Alabama. The Huskies lost at in-state nemesis Gonzaga (without an injured Roy) but beat NC State.

The Pac-10 wasn't a walk, with losses at UCLA, Arizona, Oregon State and Stanford. But the Huskies won the league tournament in impressive fashion to warrant the No. 1 seed over No. 2-seed Wake Forest in the Albuquerque Regional. To get to the Final Four in St. Louis, the Huskies might have to beat Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech, Louisville, Gonzaga and/or Wake Forest along the way.

"The No. 1 seed helps go a long way toward tearing down one perception and starting another," Romar said of a program that's not elite becoming one. "Being one of the four No. 1 seeds, [there's] a certain perception and credibility that your program gets."

Roy said his teammates have taken ownership of the No. 1 seed, knowing the responsibility that comes with it.

"The responsibility is to win, since no No. 1 has lost a first-round [game] and 85 percent get past the second round," Roy said. "You don't want to lose as the No. 1 since the first one that does will be all that everyone talks about."

The Huskies haven't lost a game yet, and they're still the talk of the tournament for getting the No. 1.

"Washington has a great opportunity in front of it now," Calhoun said.

UW did in 1998, too, but couldn't finish off UConn. Who knew what was about to unfold in the ensuing years? Washington is back, and it appears the program won't fade into obscurity anytime soon.

Andy Katz is a senior writer at ESPN.com.