Relive the Highlights of UMBC's Brief, Glorious March Madness Run
On Friday, the 16-seeded University of Maryland, Baltimore County turned the men's college basketball world on its head with a 74-54 victory over Virginia, the No. 1 overall seed in the 2018 NCAA tournament.
It was the first time a 16 seed ever defeated a 1 seed in the men's tournament, and it came 20 years after 16-seed Harvard beat 1-seed Stanford in the women's tournament.
To celebrate the historic occasion, Sports Illustrated created a special digital cover, similar to what happened in 2015 for the U.S. Women's soccer team after it won the World Cup.
You can purchase your own copy of the cover here.
Thanks to the unbelievable win, the UMBC Retrievers turned into the world's favorite college basketball team overnight.
After people got over the shock of their brackets being completely destroyed, they immediately embraced the underdogs from the America East, who only made the NCAA tournament because of a buzzer beater in the conference tournament championship.
From undersized point guard K.J. Maura to the second-leading scorer in program history Jairus Lyles to the school's chess team, anything related to UMBC helped shed a new light on what took place in Charlotte.
The school is almost guaranteed to see an increase in applications (The Flutie Effect) thanks to the victory, and America gets free pizza courtesy of Little Caesars, even though there are no Little Caesars near the UMBC campus. The @UMBCAthletics Twitter page jumped from around 5,000 followers to about 110,000 during the opening weekend of the tournament and while the rest of Twitter went into a frenzy in reaction to the absurd demolition of the top team in the country.
There were people like Maryland Governor Larry Hogan who always had faith in the Retrievers and people like Lane Kiffin who just wanted to hop on the train after it started moving.
While the UMBC players basked in the glory of their upset as if it were a win on Fortnite, the Virginia players were left to answer questions they probably never planned on receiving about their historic season.
It all came to an end for the Retrievers in their next game against Kansas State, which they lost 50-43, but their blowout over the Cavaliers will live on forever.
Take a look back at some of the best moments from the game below, as chronicled by Sports Illustrated and the UMBC athletics Twitter account.
The Retrievers have only made one other trip to the NCAA tournament, and it was in 2008 as a 15 seed, when they lost to 2-seed Georgetown 66-47. That Georgetown team would lose its next game to Steph Curry and 10-seed Davidson.
