Dusty May was a student manager at Indiana. He cut tobacco and worked turkey barns in Greene County before that. He taped ankles, rebounded during shooting drills, and handed towels to players whose names he still remembers. Bob Knight, the coach whose temper was legendary and whose coaching tree produced more branches than any in the sport's history, was his boss. May was not a player. He was the person who made sure the players had water. [1]

That was 2000. The Final Four was in Indianapolis that year, too. May was there, not coaching, not playing -- looking for a job. Twenty-six years later, on Saturday night in the same city, Dusty May's Michigan Wolverines annihilated Arizona 91-73 to advance to the national championship game. [2] He will coach for the title on Monday night. In Indianapolis. Where it started.

The biography between those two data points reads like fiction that an editor would reject for being too neat. Eight coaching stops: a video coordinator job at USC, then stints at Eastern Michigan, UAB, Louisiana Tech (six seasons), and Florida before landing at Florida Atlantic. At FAU, a program nobody outside Boca Raton could locate on a map, May took a nine-seed to the 2023 Final Four in a run that made Cinderella look plausible as a career plan. [1] Michigan hired him after that run. His first full season in Ann Arbor, the Wolverines went 8-24. [3] It was the worst record in program history. The kind of season that gets coaches fired. The kind that, in May's case, was the foundation for everything that followed.

What May built at Michigan is not complicated to describe. It is nearly impossible to replicate. The Wolverines play a read-and-react offense with no set plays, move the ball with a patience that borders on philosophical conviction, and shoot threes at a rate that would make an analytics department blush. They are averaging 95.3 points per game in the tournament -- the highest since 1993. [2] They have won eleven games this season by thirty or more points. The Arizona semifinal was not competitive after the first ten minutes.

The system works because May does not recruit to a system. He recruits people and then builds around what they do well. Yaxel Lendeborg transferred from UAB, where May had coached, and went from making 25 threes in a season to 65 -- an All-American. [1] Aday Mara, a 7-foot-3 center from UCLA, plays like a point guard who happens to be enormous. Elliot Cadeau runs the offense with the vision of someone who sees passes the way chess players see three moves ahead. Morez Johnson Jr. nearly doubled his scoring average from 7.0 to 13.2 points per game. [1] May did not change who they were. He changed how much of themselves they could use.

The family dimension of Saturday night would strain credulity if it were scripted. His wife Anna -- his high school sweetheart from Greene County -- was in the stands. So was their eldest son, Charlie, a senior walk-on reserve who earlier this tournament hit a three-pointer in Michigan's blowout of Tennessee that sent the arena into a specific kind of joy reserved for moments when a coach's kid makes a shot that does not matter to the scoreboard and matters enormously to everything else. [1] Their middle son, Eli, is a sophomore manager who codes game video. Their youngest, Jack, works for the Miami Heat. The Mays are a basketball family in the way that other families are farming families or military families: the work is the identity.

May is the eighteenth head coach in NCAA history to bring two different programs to the Final Four. [2] The list includes names like Rick Pitino, Lute Olson, and John Calipari -- coaches who did it with blue-blood resources, television contracts, and recruiting budgets that could fund small nations. May did it with FAU and then with a Michigan program that was, two seasons ago, historically bad. He earns approximately $5.1 million annually, which sounds like a fortune until you compare it to the $11.7 million John Calipari collects at Arkansas. [1]

Monday's opponent is UConn, which beat Illinois 71-62 in Saturday's other semifinal and is seeking its third consecutive national championship. [2] Dan Hurley's program is the closest thing college basketball has to an inevitability. Michigan is the closest thing it has to an impossibility. The championship will be played in Lucas Oil Stadium, seventeen miles from the campus in Bloomington where Dusty May once fetched towels for Bob Knight.

He was asked after Saturday's win whether the moment felt surreal. "I've been in a lot of gyms," May said. "Some of them had two hundred people in them. This one has about seventy thousand. But the game is the same. Five guys, one ball, ten baskets." [1] It is the kind of answer a student manager gives. Someone who learned the game not from the spotlight but from the periphery, where you see everything because nobody is looking at you.

The championship game is Monday at 9:20 p.m. Eastern. Indianapolis. Where Dusty May once went looking for a job and found, instead, the long way home.

-- AMARA OKONKWO, Indianapolis