As a born and raised Tucsonan since 2006, I’ve never had the pleasure of knowing what it was like to see their hometown team make it to the Final Four. I’ve seen many playoff runs for the Wildcats. Always the same as they run deep into the Elite Eight or Sweet Sixteen.
That changed when Arizona Men’s Basketball defeated Purdue University Saturday, sending them to the Final Four. This being their first since all the way back in 2001. For context, a majority of the class of 2026 has never even seen it.
As a matter of fact, most of the UA’s student body has no clue what was happening in the second year of a new millennium. So how about a good look at what campus, the nation and specifically, the world looked like back then?
For starters, Arizona was a part of the Pac-10 conference at the time. This was ten years before it would become the Pac-12, adding the University of Colorado and the University of Utah.
To start in the sports world, while the Wildcats did make it to the Final Four and even the National Championship, they were unable to snatch victory losing 82 – 72 against the Duke University Blue Devils. Another fun fact, no NCAA college basketball champion has come from west of the Mississippi River since 1997 when the Wildcats won theirs.
Other UA sports highlights include the softball and baseball seasons. Softball won the 2001 Woman’s College World Series for the sixth time ever beating UCLA for the first championship in the new millennium.
Baseball was at the changing point when Jerry Stitt stepped down from the head coaching role and Andy Lopez was brought on. At that time, baseball was still on campus at Frank Sancet Field located across both McKale Center and Arizona Stadium. Now, it’s the football stadium’s practice facility.
This wouldn’t be the only year a team from the state won it all. In September, the Arizona Diamondbacks took home the World Series from the New York Yankees in a sensational seven game series stopping them from winning four times in a row. This was the first and only professional team to ever win a championship in the state.
In media, these were the specific chart toppers. For movies, the number movie at the box office was Spy Kids which released three days before where it grossed over $27 million in its first weekend. For music, the Billboard Hot 100 lists Butterfly by Crazy Town as the number one song.
In the world of video games, this is the year Microsoft would release the Xbox on Nov. 15, 2001, along with Nintendo releasing the GameCube on Nov. 18.
The world of medicine had its highlights too when the first transplant of a fully self-contained artificial heart was recorded in a hospital at the University of Louisville hospital in Kentucky.
Although the planet’s astral technology was nowhere near where Stanley Kubrick imagined it to be in his thriller 2001: A Space Odyssey, the planet still had its views stretched beyond the atmosphere. Specifically on Mars where the Mars Odyssey mission discovered that ice laid buried beneath the plant’s surface. This was found. If you’re wondering, of course, the UA was involved.
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