Maybe you’re not a careful curator of basketball brackets. Maybe you’ve been depressed since your bracket (along with millions of others) was destroyed by the defeat of No. 1 Virginia by No. 16 University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Or maybe you’ve said to yourself already once this week, “If I hear ‘Final Four’ one more time …”

Whoever you are, there have been some remarkable feel-good moments for each of the four remaining teams — from a flying nun to a police-embraced street party — that may kick up your enthusiasm level and help you break a smile, even for the most hesitant of sports fans.

Loyola-Chicago: “God bless, and go Ramblers”

When the Loyola University Chicago Ramblers were invited to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 33 years — and then made it all the way to the Elite Eight — it left brackets shattered.

It’s a classic Cinderella story, and behind every Cinderella, there’s a fairy godmother doing some of the heavy lifting.

In this case, she’s a 98-year-old nun.

Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, otherwise known as Sister Jean, stole the spotlight this year. She has been the team chaplain, full of smiles and spark, for a quarter century. And she has been rooting the Ramblers on for 60 years.

Loyola players huddle around their chaplain before each game. Sister Jean — decked in a pair of custom sneakers that have been called both “Air Jeans” and “Prayer Jordans”— says a prayer covering not only her own team but the opponent as well.

“Good and gracious God,” she begins, according to The New York Times. She asks God to protect the players and to ensure that referees make fair calls, closing her prayer with an “Amen, and go Ramblers!”

She has become so popular that she licensed her name and image for merchandise sales for proceeds that go back to the university and charity. In fact, a bobblehead of Sister Jean is now the all-time top-selling bobblehead made by the Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum. Sister Jean bobbleheads were previously issued in 2011 and 2015. On eBay, someone’s asking $500 for one of those. A new version, due in June and costing $25, can be ordered now.

“I think Sister Jean has really captivated the nation,” Phil Sklar, CEO of the Bobblehead Hall of Fame, told ABC. “Within 24 hours, we sold at least one bobblehead to someone in all 50 states, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom.”

The nun is a former basketballer herself; The Chicago Tribunereports Sister Jean played basketball during high school, before joining the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary convent in Iowa.

She knows hoops.

The Times reports: Loyola-Chicago head coach Porter Moser found a manila folder on his desk his first day as coach in 2011. Inside it was a scouting report, compiled by Sister Jean, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of each player he had inherited.

Sister Jean has been in a wheelchair since breaking her hip in November, but that hasn’t stopped her from being the Ramblers’ biggest cheerleader. She’s still on the sidelines, Air Jeans and all.

Michigan: Teamwork makes the dream work

Michigan has the near impossible task of trying to compete with Loyola, not just in their Final Four matchup Saturday but also in best story of the remaining teams.

But Michigan does have quite the story to tell in its own right. The Wolverines flew under the radar early in the season, overlooked and underestimated. And yet, here they are — on a 13-game win streak, no less.

They’ve done it with a combination of good shooting, solid defense and a little bit of luck of the draw. Michigan is a 3-seed, and its highest opponent because of a slew of upsets was sixth-seeded Houston. And against Houston, the Wolverines needed a 3-pointer at the buzzer from a freshman to move on.

Coach John Beilein credits his team’s chemistry and doggedness for its success. “I’ve never seen a team work so hard and be so connected on both ends of the floor, even when things do not go right on the offensive end,” Beilein told The Detroit News.

Beilein has instilled a can-do attitude in his team, but it wasn’t until recently that the players really believed they could go all the way.

“Nah, I’m not gonna lie, I never expected us to make it this far,” junior Charles Matthews told The Detroit News.

Matthews led the Wolverines in scoring with 17 points in Saturday’s win against Florida State.

“But we believe now,” he said, “and that’s where it all starts, with the belief system. … When you have guys like that who are truly your brothers, anything’s possible.”

This is the Wolverines’ eighth trip to the Final Four, but if they win the national championship, it would also be only their second in school history and their first since 1989. The Fab Five team that garnered so much attention for starting five freshmen — an anomaly at the time in college basketball — lost in the 1992 championship game.

They did, however, change the length of basketball shorts forever.

Villanova: Like father, like son

Villanova point guard Jalen Brunson takes after his father. He has been a rising star in the sport — just like his dad, Rick Brunson, a retired NBA player. This is Jalen’s second NCAA tournament. He played as a freshman when Villanova won the national championship.

Rick Brunson didn’t make it past the Elite Eight in his NCAA run playing for Temple — against Michigan. Brunson has said his son was named after Jalen Rose, one of his Michigan opponents and one of the members of the famous Fab Five.

Brunson made a career as an NBA player and is now an assistant coach with the Minnesota Timberwolves. His busy NBA schedule hasn’t allowed him to make every one of son’s games, but he was in the crowd on Sunday, cheering Jalen on as the Wildcats beat Texas Tech to make it to the Final Four.

Through all the celebration, the 21-year-old Jalen found his father in the first row of the stands and they hugged over the barrier, reported The Salem News.

“That was so great — it meant the world to me,” said Jalen to The Salem News. “My dad means so much to me, what he does for me and everything else.”

Kansas: Police-sanctioned party

Sports fans can be rowdy.

In 2013, MLB fans flipped cars after the Red Sox won the World Series. Fans of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles once pelted Santa Claus with snowballs. Celebrations after the Chicago Bulls won NBA championships in 1991 and 1992 led to about 1,000 arrests and $10 million in damage.

But in Lawrence, Kan., when the Kansas Jayhawks made it to the Final Four after six years, the city was in pure — and peaceful — celebration mode, reports USA Today, thanks, in part, to the police.

Thousands of fans poured into the streets for the hours-long celebration. Lawrence Police tweeted an update on March 25: “0 arrests, 0 citations, 1 Final Four appearance.”

And though it seemed that it couldn’t get any better, it did. The celebration became a police-sanctioned party when law enforcement said that it would be more lenient about open-container laws, as long as the beverages were in plastic cups.

Rock Chalk Jayhawk, indeed.

The Michigan Wolverines will play the Loyola-Chicago Ramblers Saturday at 6:09 p.m. ET. The Villanova vs. Kansas game will follow, with tipoff at 8:49 p.m. ET.

Adrienne St. Clair is an intern on NPR’s National Desk; Asia Simone Burns is an intern with NPR Digital News.

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After weeks of play, four teams are left standing: Villanova, Kansas, Michigan and Loyola-Chicago.

The Villanova Wildcats and Kansas Jayhawks aren’t really a surprise — they were both top seeds heading into the tournament.

They will play each other on Saturday in San Antonio, Texas, and then only one top seeded team will remain. The other semifinal game features No. 3 Michigan Wolverines and No. 11 Loyola-Chicago Ramblers.

The Ramblers may have a bit of an edge. After all, they have Sister Jean Delores Schmidt. If you’ve seen any of their games on TV, the 98-year-old nun is hard to miss.

Sister Jean serves as the chaplain of the basketball team and apparently is a mighty good luck charm and a marketer’s dream.

ESPN reports that Loyola-Chicago officials have asked Sister Jean for permission to license her name and image as demand from licensees came in to the school’s athletic department.

“We weren’t going to do anything until she gave her blessing,” said Tom Sorboro, a senior associate athletic director at the school.

“She didn’t ask for anything for herself,” including compensation, Sorboro said.

“So far, Loyola has approved more than 25 Sister Jean T-shirts from a variety of companies including Fanatics, which made a Final Four shirt with her phrase, “Worship. Work And Win.”

The school also promises more Sister Jean bobbleheads in June — supplies have been depleted for now.

Loyola-Chicago got to the Final Four by defeating Kansas State over the weekend — becoming only the fourth No. 11 seed to reach the Final Four.

As Quinn Klinefelter of member station WDET reports for NPR’s Newscast unit:

“Loyola-Chicago faces a Michigan team whose big men Moe Wagner and Duncan Robinson helped the Wolverines squeeze past Florida State.

It took overtime and a career game from Malik Newman for Kansas to get past Duke to reach the semifinals — they came just short of the past two years.

They meet Villanova, a team of prolific scorers that relied on defense to out-muscle Texas Tech.”

Villanova won the national title two years ago. Juniors Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges were on that championship team. They are now the Wildcats leading scorers.

In 2008, Kansas won the championship. Since then, they have been seeded No. 1 five times but failed to make the Final Four any of those times.

Michigan State last won the title in 1989. They had a 13-game winning streak this season which is only second to Loyola-Chicago which won 14 straight.

The last time Loyola-Chicago won the championship was in 1963.

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In 2009, the former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon took on the NCAA in a lawsuit that challenged the organization’s ability to profit from the likenesses of college athletes in a video game. But as the case heated up, its stakes and scope began to sprawl, opening a can of worms that threatened to upend one of the bedrock principles of college sports: amateurism.

“I wanted … to get the NCAA to at least admit that they were wrong in using former players likeness for profit, and that eventually branched off into current players owning their likeness and why they should,” O’Bannon said to me on the Code Switch podcast. “Then it branched off later into actual current players getting paid from the universities and from the NCAA — not only basketball and football, but all athletes. Men and women.”

The NCAA will make $771 million from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this year. The coaches at the biggest basketball schools have average salaries of around $3 million. But most Americans are not on board with the idea that the men who play the games should be paid.

There is a racial split here: A majority of white people oppose paying college athletes while a majority of black people are in favor. As we learned on the podcast, racial resentment toward African-Americans is a very strong predictor of opposition to paying student-athletes. (And let’s not forget the racial optics of the NBA’s “one-and-done rule,” by which most of the very best pro basketball prospects must spend a year masquerading as undergraduates because the NBA bars them from entry until they’re a year out of high school.)

Ekow Yankah, a law professor at Cardozo Law School in New York City (and a huge fan of University of Michigan sports), offered a somewhat counterintuitive take on all this in a New Yorker essay, “Why N.C.A.A. Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid.” Yankah believes the current system is unfair and rife with exploitation, but believes that paying college athletes would essentially just entrench that arrangement.

Below is an edited version of our conversation with him on the Code Switch podcast episode, “The Madness of March.”

Walk us through what you think might happen if we paid college athletes.

I think paying college athletes is almost certainly bad for the athletes, terrible for the universities and terrible for the sports they play. Other than that, it’s a great idea. There’s very little reason to think that a young athlete’s life will be in any substantial way better if they become, so to speak, employees of the university.

Of course, many of these young men are under tremendous financial difficulty. I understand that a good number of them come from backgrounds which are difficult or even impoverished, and I’m well-aware that the demands of big-time college sports, but almost all college sports, are so consuming that there seems something unfair about their having to balance these two projects.

The problem is that paying them doesn’t help relieve that stress, paying them only makes it the case that that stress seems justified. Paying college athletes will almost certainly exacerbate a problem that has been going on for generations, where athletes of a certain number of sports are seen as ever more divided from the actual student body. They’re seen as tangential. They’re seen as not real students. And, indeed, given that they will then have to trade some of the minimal protections that they have as student-athletes in order to simply be employees of the university, at least in some capacity. It seems like a pretty raw deal. All of this, by the way, is in exchange for what it would actually be, for the vast majority of athletes, a remarkably small amount of money on the free market.

You’re saying that the best players would get the most money, but most players would get a pittance, if it was not equalized.

The point is that it’s awfully hard to project which kids will be superstars. So outside of the small number of “can’t-miss” prospects, most kids will actually be paid on some scale that reflects the deep uncertainty about how good they’ll be. And if we want to see what that looks like, we don’t have to use our imagination. We can look at the minor leagues: minor league basketball, minor league baseball and minor league hockey. Most of these young people are working nonstop. Most of them are just as talented, if not more talented, than the vast majority of college athletes. Most of them are paid roughly what a Starbucks barista is paid. And in exchange for all that, they give up their opportunity to go to college, to pursue their dreams and to turn out to not be a 20 year-old superstar but maybe a 40 year-old functioning adult.

You say that there is a racial component to the way that people think about the minor league systems, and the prospect of paying student-athletes in men’s basketball and football.

One thing I worry about is this argument that, “Well, these students aren’t really students, anyway. So let’s just pay them.” And I do think that has a racial component. It’s not entirely racial, of course. Part of it is that people are well-aware and turned off by the huge financial incentive that the universities have.

But it’s also true that there are a ton of different students on every college campus who are not straight-A math students. Somehow when we think about young black athletes and what they do, the sort of physical talent that they bring is not valued the same way that the ballerina’s is or the chess player’s is, or the musician’s is — and I do find that worrying. I wonder why it is that these are multitalented people whose skills may not be at its highest in science class is so quickly dismissed.

It’s very clear that the true developmental league of the NBA is currently college basketball. The true developmental league of the NFL is entirely college football. And, somehow, the answer seems to be, “disconnect these students from education” rather than, “why don’t we do what we do with other sports and set up a robust semi-pro league?” One that would allow some students, those who are actually involved and engaged, to remain student-athletes and allow those for whom being a student-athlete has no part of their project to go on to do what they want to do.

But it seems like even with that system [where minor leagues for football and basketball exist alongside the traditional college system for those sports], there’s still a lot of kids who have no illusions about the fact that that they’re not going to go pro, who will go to college, who will try to make the most of their college experience and will still generate tons of revenue for those colleges while they personally struggle financially because they can’t be paid. I’m just curious what happens to those kids.

I think that’s a great question, and it gets the heart of how complex and hard this is. If you’re a student-athlete who comes to Michigan well-aware that you’re never going to professional, then there’s a real sense in my mind’s eye that you will make the deal that makes being a student-athlete worth it. That is to say, that your education will actually be valuable to you in a way that matters. You’ll be much less likely to be fooled or to trade on these fumes of dreams that allow school after school to give college athletes empty classes with no value that end up with empty degrees with no value.

I am not interested in a bunch of young men who work for three or four years for a university making a minor league salary, which, if people actually looked at what that would be, is quite minimal. I’m interested in the next generation of doctors and lawyers and bankers. And in particular, for the sports that are dominated by African-American men, I’m deeply interested in the next generation of black doctors, black lawyers and black bankers, rather than kids who are seduced into trading that for making spending money from 18 to 22.

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A single four-letter word — added to a provision of the tax code — has professional sports leagues scrambling, as teams face what could be millions of dollars in new taxes.

“Real.”

The revision changed a section of the tax code that applies to “like-kind exchanges.” Under the old law, farmers, manufacturers and other businesses could swap certain “property” assets — such as trucks and machinery — without immediately paying taxes on the difference in value.

The 2017 tax overhaul inserted the word “real” before “property.” With that, the provision now applies only to real estate swaps.

That means teams could be looking at tax bills in the millions for trading player contracts. Major League Baseball is already lobbying Washington to carve out an exception.

Jim Tankersley, who reported on the issue this week for The New York Times, explains what the change could mean for teams, and how leagues are responding.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Interview Highlights

What the provision is, and how it changed

The provision mostly applies to farmers and fleet owners, people who own machinery. What it allows you to do is, if you trade property … you don’t pay taxes on the value you gain in that trade, until you sell the truck. …

This provision has been narrowed now, so that it only applies to real estate. And that excludes trucks and farm animals … and baseball players.

This is a $31 billion savings over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

On why lawmakers narrowed the tax break

There were a lot of provisions like this in the tax bill. Lawmakers call these changes “base-broadening,” but what that really means is: they’re raising some taxes to capture new federal revenue, in order to pay for the tax rates they cut. Lawmakers needed more money to pay for those rates, and the way they found that money was to close loopholes like the one that was in this provision.

On how this affects sports trading

Right now, based on a ruling from the ’60s, when teams trade players, [the players] are treated like a “like-kind exchange.” … A player contract is like a truck.

But now, because they’re not real estate, these players have to be traded in a way that there might be taxable values.

What that means is, teams have to figure out how much a player is worth to them in dollar figures, and how much the player they might be giving away is worth. And if they’re getting more back than they gave, they’ve got to pay taxes on that — capital gains taxes.

So the question is: How do you value [each player]? Is he ‘how many extra wins he brings to your team’? Is he ‘how many extra wins he brings for how much money he costs’? Or is he some special formula of ‘how much he would bring to you value-wise’ that is different from one team to the other, because your team might have three second basemen and my team has none?

On the size of the tax hit

The Houston Astros won the World Series last year. And on the way to winning the World Series, they traded for a pitcher named Justin Verlander from the Detroit Tigers. Some experts I talked to estimate that the value the Astros got back in that trade was probably about $10 million above what they had given up. So in that case, $10 million value, 15 percent capital gains tax — that’s $1.5 million that the Astros would have give to the government. And the Astros have made several other trades like that over the last few years. That adds up.

On sports leagues lobbying Congress

Major League Baseball says they’re already at work on it. I would not be surprised if the other leagues are close behind. …

One reason Congress might not [go along with what major sports leagues want] is because of Washington partisan politics. Democrats don’t seem likely to give Republicans any fixes on this law that [the GOP] passed without Democratic votes, so you could see a stalemate going forward on this. A reason to think that sports lobbyists might actually get Congress to cave is that Congress always caves to sports leagues. Baseball has an antitrust exemption. ….

It’s a real possibility that [Congress could just pass] the ‘Make Sports Trades Great Again’ Act of 2018 on a voice vote, because nobody wants to be the one who stopped their local team from making the trade it needed to win a championship.

NPR’s Emily Sullivan produced this story for digital.

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There’s a hole at the heart of quantum physics.

It’s a deep hole. Yet it’s not a hole that prevents the theory from working. Quantum physics is, by any measure, astonishingly successful. It’s the theory that underpins nearly all of modern technology, from the silicon chips buried in your phone to the LEDs in its screen, from the nuclear hearts of the most distant space probes to the lasers in the supermarket checkout scanner. It explains why the sun shines and how your eyes can see. Quantum physics works.

Yet the hole remains: Despite the wild success of the theory, we don’t really understand what it says about the world around us. The mathematics of the theory makes incredibly accurate predictions about the outcomes of experiments and natural phenomena. In order to do that so well, the theory must have captured some essential and profound truth about the nature of the world around us. Yet there’s a great deal of disagreement over what the theory says about reality — or even whether it says anything at all about it.

Even the simplest possible things become difficult to decipher in quantum physics. Say you want to describe the position of a single tiny object — the location of just one electron, the simplest subatomic particle we know of. There are three dimensions, so you might expect that you need three numbers to describe the electron’s location. This is certainly true in everyday life: If you want to know where I am, you need to know my latitude, my longitude, and how high above the ground I am. But in quantum physics, it turns out three numbers isn’t enough. Instead, you need an infinity of numbers, scattered across all of space, just to describe the position of a single electron.

This infinite collection of numbers is called a “wave function,” because these numbers scattered across space usually change smoothly, undulating like a wave. There’s a beautiful equation that describes how wave functions wave about through space, called the Schrödinger equation (after Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian physicist who first discovered it in 1925). Wave functions mostly obey the Schrödinger equation the same way a falling rock obeys Newton’s laws of motion: It’s something like a law of nature. And as laws of nature go, it’s a pretty simple one, though it can look mathematically forbidding at first.

Yet despite the simplicity and beauty of the Schrödinger equation, wave functions are pretty weird. Why would you need so much information — an infinity of numbers scattered across all of space — just to describe the position of a single object? Maybe this means that the electron is smeared out somehow. But as it turns out, that’s not true. When you actually look for the electron, it shows up in only one spot. And when you do find the electron, something even stranger happens: The electron’s wave function temporarily stops obeying the Schrödinger equation. Instead, it “collapses,” with all of its infinity of numbers turning to zero except in the place where you found the electron.

So what are wave functions? And why do they only obey the Schrödinger equation sometimes? Specifically, why do they only obey the Schrödinger equation when nobody is looking? These unanswered questions circumscribe the hole at the heart of quantum physics. The last question, in particular, is notorious enough that it has been given a special name: the “measurement problem.”

The measurement problem seems like it should stop quantum physics in its tracks. What does “looking” or “measurement” mean? There’s no generally agreed-upon answer to this. And that means, in turn, that we don’t really know when the Schrödinger equation applies and when it doesn’t. And if we don’t know that — if we don’t know when to use this law and when instead to put it aside — how can we use the theory at all?

The pragmatic answer is that when we physicists do quantum physics, we tend to think of it only as the physics of the ultra-tiny. We usually assume that the Schrödinger equation doesn’t really apply to sufficiently large objects — objects like tables and chairs and humans, the things in our everyday lives. Instead, as a practical matter, we assume that those objects obey the classical physics of Isaac Newton, and that the Schrödinger equation stops applying when one of these objects interacts with something from the quantum world of the small. This works well enough to get the right answer in most cases. But almost no physicists truly believe this is how the world actually works. Experiments over the past few decades have shown that quantum physics applies to larger and larger objects, and at this point few doubt that it applies to objects of all sizes. Indeed, quantum physics is routinely and successfully used to describe the largest thing there is — the universe itself — in the well-established field of physical cosmology.

But if quantum physics really applies at all scales, what’s the true answer to the measurement problem? What’s actually going on in the quantum world? Historically, the standard answer was to say that there is no measurement problem, because it’s meaningless to ask what’s going on when nobody’s looking. The things that happen when nobody’s looking are unobservable, and it’s meaningless to talk about unobservable things. This position is known as the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum physics, after the home of the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Bohr was the godfather of quantum physics and the primary force behind the Copenhagen interpretation.

Despite its historical status as the default answer to these quantum questions, the Copenhagen interpretation is inadequate. It says nothing about what’s going on in the world of quantum physics. In its stubborn silence on the nature of reality, it offers no explanation of why quantum physics works at all, since it can point to no feature of the world that is anything like the mathematical structures at the heart of the theory. There’s no compelling logical or philosophical grounds for declaring unobservable things meaningless. And the word “unobservable” isn’t much better defined than the word “measurement” anyhow. So declaring unobservable things meaningless is not only a silly position, it’s a vague one. That vagueness has plagued the Copenhagen interpretation from the start; today, the “Copenhagen interpretation” has become a collective label for several mutually contradictory ideas about quantum physics.

Despite this host of problems, the Copenhagen interpretation was overwhelmingly dominant within the physics community for much of the 20th century, because it allowed physicists to perform accurate calculations without worrying about the thorny questions at the heart of the theory. But over the past 30 years, support for the Copenhagen interpretation has eroded. Many physicists still voice support for it — surveys suggest that a plurality or majority of physicists subscribe to it — but there are live alternatives that now have significant support.

The best known of these alternatives is the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum physics, which states that the Schrödinger equation always applies and wave functions never collapse. Instead, the universe continually splits, with every possible outcome of every event occurring somewhere in the “multiverse.” Another alternative, pilot-wave theory, states that quantum particles are guided in their motions by waves, and that the particles in turn can exert faster-than-light influences on far-distant waves (though this cannot be used to send energy or signals faster than light).

These two ideas give two very different depictions of reality, but they both line up perfectly with the mathematics of quantum mechanics as we know it. There are also alternative theories that modify the mathematics of quantum physics, such as spontaneous-collapse theories, which suggest that the collapse of the wave function has nothing to do with measurement, and is instead a natural process that happens entirely at random.

There are many, many other alternatives. Quantum foundations, the field that deals in resolving the measurement problem and the other basic questions of quantum theory, is a lively subject brimming with creative ideas. The hole at the heart of quantum physics is still there — there’s still an open problem that needs solving — but there are many fascinating theories that have been proposed to solve these problems. These ideas might also point the way forward on other problems in physics, such as a theory of quantum gravity, the “theory of everything” that has been the ultimate goal of physicists since Albert Einstein.

Whether that will come to pass remains to be seen. But the problems papered over by the Copenhagen interpretation for so long are finally receiving the attention they deserve. And plumbing the depths of the quantum hole may yield an entirely new perspective, not just on the world of the quantum, but on the nature of reality itself.

Adam Becker is the author ofWhat Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest For The Meaning Of Quantum Physics, published March 20. He is a visiting scholar in the University of California, Berkeley, Office for History of Science and Technology. Becker holds a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Michigan and a BA in philosophy and physics from Cornell.

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Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy ended his drought in convincing fashion Sunday.

The four-time major tournament winner went on a final-round birdie binge to win the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Orlando, Fla. It was his first victory since 2016. McIlroy pulled away at the end with five birdies on the last six holes for an 8-under par 64.

As dominant as his win was, McIlroy shared the spotlight with Tiger Woods, who finished eight shots back.

It wasn’t long ago that Woods was golf’s greatest player and a global sports icon. His dramatic downfall is well-known, as a sex scandal and injuries knocked him off his pedestal.

Now, for the second week in a row, Woods almost won a tournament. That’s saying a lot when you consider Woods essentially has been wandering in a golf desert for the better part of five years — his legendary career derailed by debilitating back problems.

But since the beginning of this year, he has been mounting a dramatic comeback. And Sunday’s final round gave Woods and his fans more reason for optimism.

Time travel and a charge

There was a moment Sunday that felt like time travel.

It was at the 13th green on the Bay Hill course, and it started when Woods, wearing his traditional Sunday red golf shirt and black hat and pants, drained a 15-foot putt. The crowd exploded in one of those “Tiger roars” heard all over the golf course. The birdie putt was his second in a row, his third in four holes, and it moved him one shot off the lead.

Woods was making a charge.

It felt like it could’ve been anywhere from 1997, the year he burst on the scene with a dominating win at the Masters, to 2013, the last year he won a PGA Tour event.

As Woods made his way to the 14th tee, it was pandemonium, with many in the gallery chanting “Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!”

His competitors out on the course, like Bryson DeChambeau, felt it too.

“Oh, it was amazing,” DeChambeau said. “I told my caddie, Tim, in the 11th fairway, I’m like, ‘Man, Tiger’s doing it!’ I was incredibly happy for him. At the same point in time I’m still trying to win a golf tournament, right?”

DeChambeau finished second. Woods’ magic moment ended on the 16th hole, when he drove the ball out of bounds.

It was as if the golf gods sent a message to Woods from on high — not yet. Actually, the real reason for his mistake was much less celestial in nature.

Standing on the 16th tee, Woods pondered three possible shots he could hit.

“If I hit a driver I had to fit it with a cut,” he told reporters after his round. “[But also] in the back of my mind [I] said, ‘Why don’t you just bomb it over the top?’ Or just hit a three-wood straight away. And so I’m running through these different scenarios and it’s on me. I didn’t commit to either one of those three shots and I hit a poor one.”

It cost him a stroke and was the start of a shaky finish to an otherwise positive round.

Woods tied for fifth, one week after tying for second. In his mind, the comeback that even he doubted was possible is moving forward nicely, thanks to a fourth back surgery that seems to have worked.

“If I can play with no pain and I can feel I can make golf swings, I’ll figure it out,” he said Sunday after his round. “I’m starting to piece it together, tournament by tournament. Each tournament’s gotten a little bit crisper and a little bit better.”

His results bear that out. He has gone from 23rd to a missed cut to a 12th-place finish to second and now fifth. With his final round of 3-under-par 69 on Sunday, Woods now has shot 10 straight rounds of par or better stretching back over his last three tournaments.

Augusta bound

Next up for Woods is the Masters in early April.

He hasn’t played his favorite major tournament since 2015 and he says he needs to travel to Augusta, Ga., to reacquaint himself with the course’s special characteristics.

“Playing on overseeded rye [grass]; the different spins that we’re going to encounter there,” Woods said, adding “I’ll figure out what wedge system I want to use for that week, what bounce system, get used to those bunkers. The sand’s very heavy, thick and so I’ve got to do a little bit of work.”

While Woods sweats the details, his fans will be content anticipating more time travel.

To 2005 — the last time he won there.

The idea that Woods can win another major tournament is startling. The debate over whether he could catch and pass Jack Nicklaus’ all-time record of 18 major wins — Woods has 14 — died away as Woods’ career foundered.

It’s foundering no more. And suddenly, the 42-year-old Woods is redefining what’s possible.

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The NCAA men’s basketball tournament has included 64 teams every year since 1985, split into four quadrants and seeded 1-16. In all those years — in 135 tries — no 16 seed had ever beaten a top-seeded team.

Until the University of Maryland-Baltimore County beat the stuffing out of Virginia, the best team in the country, 74-54 on Friday night.

All of which is to say, if anyone claims they picked against Virginia in their tournament pool, you should feel comfortable not believing them.

The Retrievers — who made half their three-point shots against easily the best defensive team in the country — were led by 28 points from senior guard Jairus Lyles, and also presumably every four-leaf clover along the shoulders of I-95.

UMBC outscored Virginia 53-33 in the second half, and also outrebounded the Cavaliers despite giving up a lot of height.

University of Maryland-Baltimore County advances to play ninth-seeded Kansas State on Sunday.

The Virginia Cavaliers advance to wincing at trivia questions for the rest of their lives.

“I told our guys we had a historic season,” coach Tony Bennett said after the game. “And then we go and make history as the first top seed to lose.”

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