MINNEAPOLIS _ There is always a sense of peace around Tony Bennett, even in the worst of times, a product not only of his deep religious faith but of being the son of a coach, for whom winning and losing is as much a part of life as the weather.
He remained that way through Virginia's tournament travails, the defeats and the disappointment, seemingly unperturbed, even in the wake of the unfathomable loss at the hands of UMBC. When ACC basketball media day took him back to that same arena in Charlotte, he laughed it off. When Virginia lost in the semifinals of the ACC tournament on the same floor, he pointed out everything Charlotte had given to him.
So here at the Final Four, a destiny long deferred, it isn't easy to tell, outwardly, just how validating this is for Bennett. But it is: a validation of his belief, and in this case not his religious faith but his basketball faith, his belief that his precepts and purposely built program could and would thrive in the NCAA Tournament.
"To see the resiliency and resolve and all that's gone into this program from coaches before me, players before me, and since I've been there, that's the foundation that's been laid," Bennett said Friday. "It's what you always hope for. You see it from a distance in other programs, and then you aspire to it and try to build it in the way you think is the best fit for where you're at, and that's what we've tried to do with all of our might."
Bennett hasn't wavered from any of that, not even after UMBC, although he did tweak his offense a little bit, moving away from the Cavaliers' structured mover-blocker motion a bit and adding more ball-screen freelancing. But the foundation remains the same: plenty of redshirting, a deliberate pace on offense, the pack line on defense, recruiting players who fit the program _ a throwback, in so many ways.
It's a program that more closely resembles his father's at Wisconsin than any of his ACC peers, one that so many questioned could still work in today's game, never more so than the past year, only to come out the other side and prove everyone wrong in the end.
"We've been doubted pretty much all of coach Bennett's tenure here," Kyle Guy said.
It will be interesting, in the wake of this success, to see if anything else changes. Virginia's recruiting has always been so narrowly focused on personalities that fit the program, but the Cavaliers may have access to better recruits, better players, whose ability might blur boundaries that are now absolute. Everyone always says that won't change, but talent tempts.
"You have to be careful, because you can get seduced into maybe compromising certain areas," Bennett acknowledged. "For sure, that's the ideal, guys that care about their education but if they want to be good, they want to be part of something great. That's what we're trying to do and find."
Virginia's breakthrough comes at a good time not only for Bennett but the ACC, which sent five teams to the Sweet 16 only to watch No. 1 seeds Duke and North Carolina crash out. The conference was shut out of the Final Four last year for the first time since 2014, and after becoming the second conference ever to get three No. 1s, needed at least one of the trio to get to Minneapolis.
Finally, Virginia held up its end of the bargain _ the first old-school ACC team from outside North Carolina to make the Final Four since Georgia Tech in 2004, and maybe the one with the biggest window to redeem itself and the most to lose.
"It's been a long journey," Elite Eight hero Mamadi Diakate said, and even longer for Bennett, who stayed the course until it led here.
