Florida's NBA-ready stars postponed pro riches and returned to repeat as champions, securing a lofty place in college hoops history by outgunning a familiar foe -- Ohio State -- in the title game

Take a good, hard look, America. In an era of me-first gunners, one-year supernovas (see you in the NBA, Kevin Durant) and attention spans the length of a YouTube clip, it may be a long, long time before we see another college basketball team like these Florida Gators. Just listen to forward Corey Brewer, a.k.a. the Drunken Dribbler (for his swerving forays to the hoop), who was as sober as a reverend (for a little while, at least) after his Gators claimed their second straight national title on Monday at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. "I feel like we're one of the best college basketball teams to ever play the game," Brewer said after Florida's 84-75 victory over Ohio State. "You can argue about it, but I'd put us up against anybody."

On Monday night it wasn't a hard case for Counselor Brewer to make. Not after the Gators had destroyed Ohio State from three-point range, shooting 10 for 18 while holding the Buckeyes to a miserable 4 for 23. Or after forward Al Horford had danced a Dominican merengue on his interior defenders to the tune of 18 points and 12 rebounds. Or after Brewer, named the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four, had blitzed Ohio State from every angle, producing three treys, three steals and countless grimaces of frustration from his opponents.

If last year's champions were the self-proclaimed Gator Boys, charming upstarts who rode a Banzai Pipeline wave to glory, then these titlists should go down as the History Boys, a once-in-a-generation collective that achieved one of the rarest feats in modern American team sports. Only once in the past 33 years had Division I men's college basketball crowned a repeat champ -- Duke, in 1991 and '92 -- and never had a reigning team overcome such an exhausting seasonlong barrage of questions about its chances of winning back-to-back trophies.

On Monday all those questions were answered in full, leaving Florida fans to bask in the glow of an unprecedented run that now includes the last three national championships in the two most popular college sports (two in basketball and one in football -- that one coming just three months ago against none other than Ohio State, leaving Buckeyes fans feeling as if they've been struck down by some kind of blue-and-orange curse). Yet the legacy of the History Boys will go far beyond mere trophies. "I'd like for this team to be remembered as the greatest team that ever played," Gators coach Billy Donovan said afterward. "I'm not saying this team would beat the UNLVs [of the early 1990s] and the UCLAs [of the John Wooden dynasty]. I'm not talking about wins and losses. I'm talking about the word team."

Sports Illustrated senior writer Grant Wahl covers college basketball for the magazine and SI.com.

By winning his second national championship, at age 41, Billy D launched himself into rarefied air, becoming the youngest coach to claim his second championship ring since Bob Knight (who was 40 when he won for the second time with Indiana, in 1981). From now on, coaches whose national-title teams return intact will use Donovan's masterly strategy as a case study on how to handle the pressure to repeat. It all started last April, not long after the Gators' NBA-ready stars (center Joakim Noah, Horford and Brewer) decided to postpone professional riches and return to school, when Donovan sat down in his office and began constructing a list under the heading Distractions.

I love being alone, thinking and writing down my thoughts," Donovan said during a rare break from game preparation in his Atlanta hotel last week. "I wanted to leave no stone unturned in getting our guys to be totally committed to our team. There were 10 to 15 potential distractions I looked at and said, 'These are the things I have to be ready for.'" As Donovan's list grew, he realized just how many pitfalls possibly awaited his team. Selfishness. Agents. Media demands. Yet perhaps the most intriguing distraction he included was this one: Billy Donovan.

Like nearly everything else on the list, that self-aware entry would prove prophetic. Donovan did his best to avoid becoming an issue when he decided not to sign a contract extension last summer. "I knew if I did," he said, "then [agents] would go to Noah, Horford and Brewer and say, 'How do you feel that you turned down millions of dollars, and your coach did this?'" But it also meant that he wasn't caught completely off-guard when Tubby Smith left Kentucky to coach at Minnesota on March 22, thrusting Donovan (a former Wildcats assistant and Kentucky's top choice as Smith's replacement) into a Big Blue maelstrom right in the middle of Florida's NCAA tournament run.

"Sometimes coaching vacancies come open, and if people view that you're doing a good job, you're going to get attention on that," said Donovan, who issued pitch-perfect nondenial denials when asked last week if he'd had any contacts with Kentucky. "But I also understood: [That's why] I listed Billy Donovan as one of the 'Distractions.'"

An earlier crisis had come in February, and it was the kind of thing that can tear apart a team. ESPN's Dick Vitale was caught unaware on a Knoxville, Tenn., radio station telling friends that Donovan had told him (off the record) that Horford was a better pro prospect than Noah. While Donovan insisted that he had never said such a thing, he still had a swamp-sized mess to clean up. "What made me mad was the number of people who called me to talk about it," says Noah. "I couldn't imagine how much time I'd spend talking about this petty s---. Do you really think we came back for that? To go up against each other? Come on, we're trying to make history here."

Sports Illustrated senior writer Grant Wahl covers college basketball for the magazine and SI.com.

To defuse the situation, Donovan convened a meeting with Noah and Horford in his Toyota Sequoia SUV -- a favored place for private-but-informal discussions -- on the way to the Gainesville airport the next day for a trip to Knoxville to play Tennessee. "People wanted to say, 'Shaq and Kobe! Horford and Noah aren't getting along because of the coach!'" said Donovan, screaming comically as if he were delivering a tabloid headline. "But handling things that are said in the media was also one of the distractions I anticipated."

Donovan had help, of course, none more so than from the Oh-Fours themselves, the roommates from the high school class of '04 who now must be considered one of the most cohesive and storied units in the annals of college sports. The four-man suite that houses Noah, Horford, point guard Taurean Green and Brewer looks just like any other ordinary dorm room in the Keys Complex on Stadium Drive in the center of the Florida campus, but the residents are pure sporting gold, a quartet that Donovan knows may be a once-in-a-lifetime recruiting class. "I hope not," he says of the group, which included only one McDonald's All-American (Brewer), "because this is what coaching should be like all the time. I have the joy and the hope that this could possibly happen again with these types of kids."

The Oh-Fours never faced a more daunting challenge, though, than the slide in late February in which the Gators lost three of four games, all by double digits, raising serious doubts about their chances for another title run. But then came an intervention that, according to everyone involved, changed their season. Less than 24 hours after the third defeat, an 86-76 loss at Tennessee on Feb. 27, Green's father, Sidney -- a former NBA forward -- took a day off from his job as a hotel executive in Orlando and made an emergency trip to Gainesville. When Big Sid, as the Oh-Fours call him, met with his son at the campus bookstore, he was shocked by his slumped body language and the filthy state of his Chevy Impala, which Taurean usually keeps spotless. Noah's bedroom was a mess too. The Gators had turned into a Behind the Music episode.

Over dinner that night at Yamato, the Oh-Fours' favorite Japanese steak house, Big Sid went to work. "You guys are 25-5, and you're acting like it's the end of the world," he told the four roommates. "You're trying to live up to everyone else's expectations, and you're pressing, and it shows." The players nodded their heads, and a tearful Noah came clean. "You're right," he said. "I'm not having any fun." To restore the sense of youthful wonder that drove them to last year's title, Sidney popped a copy of the Gators' breakout victory over Syracuse early last season into the DVD player back at the dorm.

On the screen was a vision from a previous life, a band of brothers diving for loose balls, running with abandon and playing with the effervescent joy of an unranked team making a giant name for itself. The dorm room erupted. "They were jumping up and down, yelling and rewinding and playing it back again," recalls Big Sid, a 6'9" mountain of a man who starred at UNLV. "After they won the SEC tournament, Joakim came to me and said, 'Big Sid, I want to thank you.' It broke me down right there."

Sports Illustrated senior writer Grant Wahl covers college basketball for the magazine and SI.com.

After Big Sid's intervention Florida never lost again. "I feel like that turned our season around," says Horford. "After that night we talked to Coach Donovan about it, and we told him, 'If we're going to go down, we're going to go down our way.'"

Suddenly Noah, in particular, was smiling again. Few college athletes have had a more bracing introduction to the peculiar American celebrity cycle than the ponytailed Gators poster boy, who has gone from being a bench-warming freshman to the 2006 Final Four MOP as a sophomore to college basketball's most vilified (and, yes, envied) athlete as a junior. Born in New York City to a French father (Yannick Noah, the Hall of Fame tennis player) and a Swedish mother (sculptor Cecilia Rodhe), Joakim is the most politically conscious hoops star since Bill Walton. A 7-foot peacenik, Joakim once marched outside the United Nations in an Iraq war protest during which, as he recalled last week, he saw protesters being dragged away by police. (Noah was presumably the only player watching C-Span in his hotel during the Final Four and issuing a whoop of "My guy!" when Barack Obama appeared on the screen.)

Noah, a dual citizen of France and the U.S., calls Gainesville "Real America," a place where he says he has learned tolerance for people who don't share his worldview. "I've met people like Coach Donovan, who is a Republican and a pretty conservative guy, but he's been like another father figure to me," Noah says. "It just showed me you don't have to have the same political views to get along."

Like a hoops version of Bernard Henri-Lévy or Alexis de Tocqueville, two other philosophical Frenchmen who became expert observers of America, Noah is familiar with both the highbrow -- his mother is a friend of the famed architect Frank Gehry -- and the lowbrow. And you don't get much more lowbrow than some of the entries on Facebook, the social networking website used primarily by college students. Facebook had 170 different pages devoted to Noah as of last week, most of them with titles like Joakim Noah Looks Like Chewbacca (623 members), I'd Pay Good $ to Punch Joakim Noah in the Face (134 members) and Joakim Noah Is about As Cool As AIDS (515 members).

"When people don't know you, who cares what they think?" Noah said last week. "But I've gone through more good than bad at the University of Florida, and I've learned so much this year." Foremost among those lessons: that when it comes to this country's celebrity culture, you have to take the good with the bad. "People talk about Joakim being French and African and Swedish," says his mother, "but he was born in the U.S., and this country has given him his big break. We feel very lucky."

After the night with Big Sid, Noah reminded himself to savor the private moments over the past month, like the time he and the Oh-Fours went to the Gainesville Chili's after winning the SEC tournament title and encountered student manager Kyle Gilreath, who sent them a round of shots to celebrate. "Thanks, man!" they yelled back, only to laugh upon discovering the shots were just Grenadine-flavored water. ("I have friends who are managers at other schools who say [negative] things about their players," says Gilreath, "but these guys are just awesome kids, like brothers [to each other].")

Senior guard Lee Humphrey isn't an Oh-Four, but he might as well be an honorary member. And while Florida's juniors didn't flinch in Saturday's 76-66 national semifinal win over UCLA, it was Humphrey who broke open a Final Four game with a barrage of second-half three-pointers for the third straight time over the past two years. "If we're all hitting our threes, it makes us tough to guard because our bigs can score as well," said Humpty, whose trio of second-half treys (and 14 points) were the result of UCLA's decision to double-team Florida's post players. "[The Bruins] did a good job taking our bigs out, but it left us wide open on the perimeter."

As Gators fans partied in the lobby of the downtown Marriott after the game, the Florida coaching staff (Donovan and assistants Donnie Jones, Larry Shyatt and Lewis Preston) gathered in a meeting room to discuss a game plan for Ohio State. Seated in front of the TV with a remote in one hand and a legal pad in his lap, Donovan started the DVD from the Gators' 86-60 win over the Buckeyes on Dec. 23 in Gainesville. As the clock struck 2 a.m., they noticed a few weaknesses they hoped to exploit: that point guard Mike Conley Jr. was less effective driving to his right than to his left and that Ohio State's defenders hardly ever double-teamed in the post. "I think our guys can get some good looks inside," Donovan reasoned.

But they had plenty of concerns, too, not least the Buckeyes' rising confidence (from a 23-game winning streak) and their lethal fast break. Perhaps most surprising was that the Gators coaches were more worried about Ohio State's transition game than about 7-foot freshman center Greg Oden's inside presence. "Their speed and spacing are incredible," said Donovan, deciding not to roll out Florida's own formidable running game. "We have to slow it down."

"We've got to take away their transition. Key to the game," said Shyatt, one of the nation's top defensive minds, who suffered a bizarre mishap just after 2 a.m. when his dental bridge popped out while he was munching on some Jujubes. Shyatt showed the bridge to everyone in the room ("That's awesome," Donovan said) before bolting down the hall, where his brother-in-law, a dentist, was able to snap the bridge back in so Shyatt could return to work, breaking down film. (Winning a repeat national crown is a gritty business, folks.)

On Monday night the Gators' strategy worked to perfection. Florida elected not to double-team Oden from the opening tip, the better to let its perimeter defenders prevent Ohio State from taking easy open three-pointers. And while Oden had a monster game, piling up 25 points and 12 rebounds, the Buckeyes' futility from three-point range was epic. "We felt like their two-point shots couldn't beat us, so we wanted to take away the three," explained Brewer, who kept sharpshooting guard Ron Lewis from making a single trey in just four attempts.

In the end, it was the Gators' attention to Lewis and a thousand other tiny details over the past two years that leaves us with the singular impression of a transcendent team for the ages. As he left the Georgia Dome floor on Monday, Noah gazed skyward and issued a plea. "Remember us! Remember us!" he screamed to the heavens. "We belong with the great ones!"

Yes, you do. Trust us: Nobody will forget the History Boys.