Final Four: Who are these guys?

Associated Press

HOUSTON

VCU arrived at the Final Four with its team, its bandwagon and its T-shirt. “There goes my bracket,” it says — a fitting statement printed in gold letters and sandwiched between the school logo and the picture of a crumpled-up piece of paper.

Indeed, almost anyone who wins an office pool this year will limp home to their victory. Hardly anyone saw this coming.

But for VCU, Butler, Connecticut and Kentucky, all of whom got their first look at the court tucked inside of Reliant Stadium on Thursday, this is a time to act like they expected it all along, to focus on winning a national championship that hardly seemed likely when the first ball was tipped back in October.

Back then, VCU was listed as a 5,000-1 longshot in Las Vegas.

Butler was figuring out how to replace NBA-bound forward Gordon Hayward and dream up a second act after almost winning it all last year, 6 miles from its campus in Indianapolis.

Connecticut was picked 10th in the Big East.

Kentucky was gearing up for a transition year after losing five key players to the NBA and freshman Enes Kanter to eligibility issues while awaiting a killer recruiting class for 2011-12.

“I never thought we’d be sitting here,” Butler coach Brad Stevens said when asked what he thought of his team’s prospects in February, when the Bulldogs were 14-9 with a three-game losing streak. “But the season starts in October and it goes until at least March 1. You’re supposed to get better. It’s hard. But if you have guys willing to work through it, it can happen.”

In the first semifinal Saturday, eighth-seeded Butler (27-9) will play 11th-seeded VCU (23-11), in a matchup of underdog mid-majors that some might consider more fitting for the Maui Invitational than a Final Four bracket.

In the second game, it’s No. 3 Connecticut (30-9) vs. No. 4 Kentucky (29-8) in the rematch of a game that really was on the schedule in Maui. UConn won 84-67 back on Nov. 24. A trip to Houston wasn’t on anyone’s mind back then.

“That game showed what we could be and certainly what John needed to fix,” UConn coach Jim Calhoun said of Kentucky’s John Calipari. “It turned out, I needed to fix some things, too, but it was later because the problems showed up in the Big East.”

All these teams had problems during the season. All got better and started peaking around the beginning of March. That has culminated in probably the most inconceivable foursome in Final Four history — not a single No. 1 or 2 seed for the first time, and a group of teams chosen by three people out of more than 8 million entrants in bracket contests run by ESPN and Yahoo.