Once you step out on the floor, you're not worried about the crowd. You just want to play basketball. |
People thought none of this was going to happen. But we're making it happen. There is a difference between athletic ability and mental toughness. I promise you Sunday will be a tough game. |
People use the word Cinderella, but a Cinderella team is only supposed to get a couple of wins. We've won four games. So I don't know if you can call us a Cinderella anymore. |
Seeing him be so happy kind of motivates us to know that basketball is a game of fun. You get too serious and get too tense, you might have jitters on the court, so we're trying to stick to that mode of having fun. It works for us. |
Shaq wants to win, and he's a winner. It's one of those things where he sees how good this team can be, and if he steps his game up, it's going to make us better. |
That alone would've been a great accomplishment. I wouldn't have thought twice about something like this [Final Four] if you had asked me a couple of weeks ago. To be in this situation is really a blessing because we could easily be on the other side of it, just watching the games. |
That kind of hurt us a little bit. We've been playing behind for a while in this tournament. We didn't put our heads down. We wanted to go out there and keep fighting. |
That's when I thought we had 'em, when I went to the line. |
The game is physical. But it's mental, too. We're a very strong mental team. |
The last time against Carolina, they got out on us. We wanted to deliver the first blow. We didn't want to take any blows tonight. |
There hasn't been a game in this tournament where we were too tight. That's because he won't let us. All along, we felt like we belonged. |
They set the tone for what college basketball is today. |
This has been crazy. I can just imagine in Indiana. I mean there are four teams left in college basketball out of three hundred-some teams. We have all the press coming from all over the country. I might need a mask or something. |
This is the same feeling we've had for the last couple of weeks. We've done something tremendous and the fans have had our backs, win or lose the whole year. It's good to see they're not only here when we're winning, but when we lose too. |
This team is so well balanced that someone is going to step up every night, and the last couple of nights it's been Lamar. He's a great shooter, and there were times where I had a great shot, but I knew Lamar was a little bit more open than I was. I gave it to him and he just knocked it down. |