The University of Illinois Fighting Illini basketball team has had a rough season. Picked by some as Big Ten championship contenders, they started the season ranked in the top 25 teams in the country. After lots of inconsistent play, they ended up in the middle of the Big Ten pack and got seeded in the lower half of the bracket for the NCAA tournament. Their first game pit them against UNLV, coached by Lon Kruger, U of I coach from 1996-2000.

Kruger was a good coach, ran a clean program, and left at the time for the NBA, hardly an unforgivable sin. Some Illini fans would still love to have him back, if only for the fact that he isn't Bruce Weber.

Weber is the current Illinois coach, who began his tenure auspiciously with a trip to the championship game in 2005, his second season. Since then his teams have been mired in mediocrity, only making the NCAA tournament twice the past four years, and not getting out of the first round.

But not this year. Illinois played about as well as it has played all year and beat UNLV by 11. It was a good win and took away some of the bitter taste from a disappointing season. Of course, a win in the next game would be the potential season-maker. The next opponent was Kansas, seeded first in the region and coached by Bill Self, the Illini head coach from 2000-2003.

Self was the prototypical new-era college coach: relatively young, handsome, energetic, charismatic, recruiting-savvy, on the verge of building a new sustained excellence. Illinois fans were smitten. Then he left - for a bigger name, better tradition, more money, maybe a less clingy fanbase. And while he's gone on to win a national championship and moved on in general, jilted Illinois fans have always wondered what could have been.

Weber has taken the brunt of the pent-up frustration, partly because he's the anti-Self, not producing on the court and not smooth enough off the court to make up for it. This could be his chance at a small but concentrated dose of redemption.

Some people have talked about this game as one that could make up for all the bad losses and poor play of the season. It's not surprising in the results-oriented arena of major college sports to think that a good run in the season-ending tournament can make up for a year of marginal effort, locker room infighting, and countless remote controls thrown across the room. But that's the way we sometimes think - where we end up is more important than the journey along the way.

Work permitting, I'll be watching the game. And it will mean something, but not everything, because I've been watching all along.