UC San Diego defeated UC Irvine 75-61 to win the Big West men's basketball championship and secure the program's first Division I NCAA Tournament appearance.
The breakthrough came in the Tritons' first year of postseason eligibility after completing the transition from Division II. Their conference tournament title followed a regular season that had already established the team nationally.
For a university better known outside San Diego for research, the berth gave UC San Diego a new kind of national visibility and added another program to the region's college basketball story.