If you want to take the entirety of the season that turned Mick Cronin into the Sporting News Coach of the Year for 2017-18, or even the decade-long journey his Cincinnati Bearcats followed from broken program to orphan program to top-10 program, and condense it to a single moment, it arrived around 1 p.m. CST in a smoking cauldron of basketball emotion in Wichita, Kansas.

With Cincinnati protecting a one-point lead that it simply ran out of energy to extend, 6-11 sophomore center Nysier Brooks was harassing Wichita State sharpshooter Conner Frankamp as he attempted to inbound the ball under the WSU basket. When Frankamp tossed the ball into play, Brooks had no option but to accept the assignment to cover him as he retrieved the ball on a dribble handoff. Frankamp has made 178 3-pointers in his career. Any jumpshot is a threat to connect. And he is a 100 percent foul shooter.

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Brooks, who averages 10 minutes a game and played eight on that afternoon, did not budge. He didn’t reach, he didn’t lunge, he didn’t fall off balance, he didn’t get beat. Frankamp forced a jumper over Brooks' reach that was wide of the target. Afterward, teammate Darral Willis got trapped beneath the basket as burly Cincinnati wing Jarron Cumberland sealed the baseline, and Brooks came dashing over to discourage any shot that looked close.

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This sequence, which so beautifully defined Bearcats basketball, lasted 9.3 seconds.

“We have a saying around here: Winners know why they win,” Cronin told Sporting News. “It’s because they’re willing to do the uncomfortable things that go into winning.”

There were many terrific Coach of the Year candidates for Sporting News to choose from this season. Tony Bennett dominated the ACC at Virginia and the Cavaliers ended the regular season as a unanimous No. 1 in the AP poll. Chris Holtmann took over Ohio State in early June and led a team picked to finish near the bottom of the Big Ten to a top-3 finish. Rick Barnes was derided by many as the Texas program faded in his final seasons with the Longhorns, then rejuvenated the Tennessee Volunteers and shared a Southeastern Conference championship in this his third season.

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What separated Cronin from these other deserving candidates, though, was the separation Cincinnati endured from the power-conference ranks in the early part of this decade. The Bearcats entered the Big East Conference in 2005-06; by 2009 their football team had gone undefeated and won the league, and by 2012 the basketball team had played in the Big East Tournament championship game.

Before the end of that calendar year, it was over. The Big East made the controversial (and not unanimous) decision to grant Tulane membership, and the conference’s basketball-first schools had seen enough.

Cincinnati was left in a league with no established brand (the American?) and whose only other basketball powers were Louisville, Memphis and Connecticut. Louisville split as soon as the ACC offered membership. And, has anyone seen Memphis or UConn lately?

No? Because that’s how hard it is on the other side of that dividing line. In basketball, there’s the Power 5 (and one), and there’s everybody else. Standing above everybody else this year was Cincinnati, which finished the regular season with a 27-4 record and clinched the conference championship clinched with that victory at Wichita.

“We worked so hard to get to the point where we played for the Big East championship,” Cronin said. “And now you’re not just recruiting saying, ‘We play in the Big East.’ Now you’re saying, ‘We played for the championship.’

“Right when we were really getting ready to use it in recruiting, the league fell apart.”

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This was not the first immense challenge of his tenure at Cincinnati, though, or even the most daunting. When Cronin took over in the spring of 2006, the Bearcats had only one returning scholarship player on the roster. Because of transfers and players not graduating consistently, the program was on Academic Progress Rate (APR) probation, looking at the possibility of losing postseason play and practice time and possibly even restrictions on how many non-league games it could schedule.

He had to build a roster capable of competing, at some level, in one of the best leagues in college basketball, and every player he attracted had to be capable of graduating. Even if he could have gotten one-and-done types, he could not have accommodated them because there was no dispensation then for players who left early. Cincinnati needed every APR point it could get.

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The program that had been No. 1 in the nation in March 2000, with Cronin as assistant coach, won two league games in his first season. A year later, though, the Bearcats went 8-10. By 2010-11, they made their first NCAA Tournament appearance under Cronin, went 26-11 and lost to eventual national champion Connecticut in the second round.

The Bearcats have not missed the NCAAs since. Their streak will reach eight tournaments on Sunday. Only Kansas, Duke, Michigan State and Gonzaga have been there more times consecutively. Only North Carolina is a lock to match the eight straight; VCU will not extend its streak without claiming the Atlantic 10’s automatic bid.

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Cronin and his coaching staff built a culture of toughness and togetherness that had to exist to survive those rugged early years and that now fuels the program’s consistent success.

“The competition was so elite. We used to play three ranked teams a week,” Cronin said. “If you didn’t compete and play hard, you had no chance. The Big East was so big, we had to get big and strong enough to where we didn’t just get run over.

“It was really an advantage for my career. We talk to our guys: How do you beat Wichita State on the road? Well we used to have to do that all the time. You can’t turn over the ball. You can’t give up easy baskets; you have to get your defense set. It’s just a standard. You have to protect it as a coach. You play defense, you rebound, you care about the team. No matter how much talent you have, you cannot lose that.”

Cronin has been able to enforce that culture because the same guys have been helping him do it for so long. His staff of Larry Davis, Darren Savino and Antwon Jackson has been together since 2012; Cronin said the only quartet together longer is the group at Michigan State.

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The depth of his staff was underscored when Cronin was unable to coach games in the 2014-15 season after being diagnosed with an arterial dissection in his brain. Davis took over the remainder of the season and the Bearcats finished 23-11, with a win over Purdue in the NCAA Tournament and then a hard-fought loss to No. 1 and undefeated Kentucky that reiterated Cincinnati rarely backs down from a challenge.

“If you win, it’s not all you. It’s your staff,” Cronin said. “You can’t start thinking you’re some genius. This game is more about players than coaches. I saw that in the year I wasn’t on the bench. You’re going to have defensive breakdowns; you’re not going to shut people out. If you lose 60-58 and you miss three wide-open layups … I became even more of a believer that you’ve got to have personnel. If you end up an 8 seed and you have a good year, that’s probably your talent level. And you maxed it out, too. You’re going to go as far as your talent allows you.”

This Cincinnati team is built on the frontcourt foundation of senior Gary Clark, such an obvious winner the American conference coaches named him their player of the year though he averaged only 12.7 points. Wing Jacob Evans is the team’s most talented player, a potential pro, but he has had to be encouraged to be more aggressive as an offensive player because his personality dictates he blend into the group.

That works great on defense. The Bearcats are the nation’s No. 2 team in defensive efficiency. Cronin never has had a team ranked in the top 20 on offense. He’s never had a first-round pick, either. But Lance Stephenson has been a longtime pro, and Sean Kilpatrick fought his way into the league.

“We’ve never been the state school. We’ve never been considered an elite,” Cronin said. “We’ve always had to scrap and claw and evaluate and figure it out in recruiting. Whatever verb you want to use. We very rarely got players that grew up dreaming of playing at Cincinnati. There are other schools that have that.

“We compete with Michigan, Michigan State, Purdue, Indiana, Louisville and Kentucky. We’re surrounded by the Power 5. You’ve got one or more on every side of you, and now you’ve got Xavier in the Big East. But we’ve never been a school where we just show up and flash our t-shirt and the kid says yes. If you look at my staff, we’ve all been at places that you have to work really hard to win.”