Pick your poison. You can find no shortage of landmines that should’ve blown up Alabama’s path to the Final Four.

Let’s start at the beginning. Alabama lost 7 of its top 9 players in minutes per game from a team that was the No. 1 overall seed in last year’s NCAA Tournament. Nate Oats had 9 new players, plus he had to replace 3 assistants and 4 support staff members.

Fast forward to the all-important late-season version of the Tide. Alabama fought back to get into the AP Top 25, but it backed its way into the NCAA Tournament with a 2-4 stretch, which included a 1-and-done showing in the SEC Tournament. The last SEC team who reached the Final Four after failing to reach the conference tournament championship was 2006 LSU. Mind you, nobody has ever won a national championship after failing to win a game in a conference tournament. Put a pin in that one.

A frustrated Oats took to the podium after that SEC Tournament quarterfinal loss and gave everyone the most likely reason why the Tide’s season could come to an end at any moment.

“If we play defense for 40 minutes, we can play with anybody in the country. If we decide to take 24 minutes off from the defensive end, it’s gonna be hard to beat anybody in the NCAA Tournament,” Oats said 2 weeks ago.

I would’ve loved to have given truth serum to Oats that night. Did he really believe that his team could “play with anyone in the country,” much less beat anyone in the country? There wouldn’t have been any shame if that answer was “no.”

But yes, indeed, Alabama just gave us 4 consecutive examples that it could do that. No landmines. Just history.

For the first time in ever, the Tide cut down the nets and celebrated a Final Four berth. It’s not a Cinderella story, but it’s certainly improbable.

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It’s fair to say that Alabama tapped into a toughness unlike anything we saw in the regular season. The Tide moved beyond Charles Barkley’s unbiased claim that it was a “frail” team with Grant Nelson’s night for the ages to knock off UNC. But look at the way things unfolded on Saturday night against a Clemson team that Oats compared to tough-as-they-come Tennessee.

The landmine was Clemson jumping out to a 26-13 lead with Alabama struggling to do much of anything right. The aforementioned Nelson picked up 2 fouls before the first TV timeout of the night and All-American Mark Sears started 0-for-6 from 3-point range. Alabama as a team started 1-for-13 from beyond the arc, which felt like more of the same against a Clemson team that held 3 NCAA Tournament opponents to a total of 14 three-pointers on 18.7% shooting.

A bad shooting night is as common of a landmine as there is in the NCAA Tournament. But when you grab offensive rebounds and don’t take 24 minutes off from the defensive end, well, you can work through that. You can also work through that when you have a coach like Oats, who refused to try and reinvent his team on the fly.

Alabama kept firing. Of course it did. The Tide shot 15-for-23 (65%) from deep the rest of the way. Clemson allowed more made threes (16) than it did in any game all year.

Nobody got hotter than Sears, who closed the game by draining 7 of his final 8 threes of the night. By now, it’s the type of thing that we’ve all come to expect to see from Sears. His well-documented shooting improvements — they referenced on the broadcast how he put up 15,000 made threes the summer after his freshman year at Ohio University — have been the steadying force all year. That was the case all second half for the new Alabama single-season points leader.

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That’s not to say that Sears, 1 of those 2 Alabama returners who ranked among the top 9 in minutes per game on last year’s squad, was the only steadying force on Saturday night. Clemson could’ve lived with that result if that were the case.

Instead, the Tigers had to watch true freshman Jarin Stevenson, 1 of those 9 new Alabama players, have the best night of his young college career. Alabama’s answer to that slow start came from a 5-point per game player who averaged 3 points in his first 3 NCAA Tournament games. Stevenson had career-highs in made threes (5) and points (19). A guy with 1 game of double-digit scoring since the second weekend of December had as many points as any Clemson player, and just in case that wasn’t enough, he defended in the paint like a 4-year starter.

Why not?

We might remember that as one of the most improbable parts of this entire NCAA Tournament run, though Nelson’s late-game brilliance against UNC will be talked about for decades.

Let’s also not forget Nick Pringle. He replaced one of Alabama’s top defenders, Latrell Wrightsell, in the starting lineup after he got hurt contesting a 3-pointer in the Round of 32 game against Grand Canyon. Oats said before the Elite Eight matchup that Pringle was dealing with a heel bruise that he aggravated in the UNC win.

If Pringle was battling anything on Saturday night, it wasn’t a banged-up foot; it was the entire Clemson lineup.

Whether it was fighting through traffic to grab offensive rebounds (he had 6) or going up strong and drawing contact to get to the free-throw line, the senior was a man possessed on the low block. Pringle, with his 1-handed motion and 54% free-throw shooting clip, made as many foul shots (8) as the entire Clemson team (8). As in, the Clemson team who was No. 9 in America in free-throw shooting, but was just 8-for-16 on the night.

You can’t make this stuff up. You can only sit back and watch in amazement.

It would be a discredit to Alabama’s body of work to call this a true Cinderella story. While that’s usually reserved for the mid-majors and the once-every-40-years NC State runs, it’s nothing short of miraculous that this was the Alabama team that broke through. It wasn’t the 2021 or 2023 teams who swept the SEC regular season and postseason. It was a portal-built masterpiece that Oats and the Tide painted.

It would be a discredit to the landmine-filled road to say that 1 specific thing got Alabama to this unprecedented place, but the word “Mudita” is at the heart of it. As Alabama softball coach Patrick Murphy explained in a speech to the team back in January, mudita is having vicarious joy in someone else’s success. Hofstra transfer Aaron Estrada said after Saturday night’s win that mudita was “the best thing to happen to this team” (via Mike Rodak).

There’s a certain joy that this Alabama team plays with. It’s seemingly never tense. It’s always ready to push the pace and find the open 3-point shooter. There’s joy in watching the grit shown by Nelson or Pringle when they finish at the rim. Even the help-side defense that Alabama played with in March has elements of mudita to it.

Alabama will need all the mudita in the world to slow down defending champ UConn in the Final Four, but there’s time to figure out how to avoid that historically significant landmine.

For now, there’s somehow nothing but vicarious joy in Tuscaloosa.