KANSAS CITY — The last time Oregon was here, the last time nets were snipped down, the last time players jumped and hugged, the last time a trophy was lifted on an Elite Eight floor with the Ducks present, Dillon Brooks stared toward the ground.

“Here,” last time, was Anaheim, and the players jumping were Oklahoma’s. A piece of nylon was in Buddy Hield’s hat. Brooks, meanwhile, sat in front of his locker. He had scored just seven points in an 80-68 loss. His eyes were glued to the floor.

“This one’s gonna hurt,” he said, dejected.

And it did hurt.

“I was depressed,” Brooks recalls. “I didn’t talk to nobody after.” He was down for a full week, wounded by the thought of being so close, yet now being so far.

“I’m gonna remember this feeling,” he said on that night, 364 days ago.

And he did remember. And so did many others, determined to get back to this stage, and determined to go one step further.

Oregon did get back to the stage, and did go a step further, stunning Kansas Saturday night to reach the Final Four for the first time since 1939. And it did so because they, the players, didn’t forget.

Jordan Bell (left) and Dillon Brooks celebrate Oregon’s Final Four berth. (Getty) More

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A couple weeks after the Elite Eight loss to Oklahoma, a couple weeks after the dejection, Jordan Bell walked into head coach Dana Altman’s office. It was nothing staged, just coach and player, reconvening after a long season. Bell, alone in the room with Altman, made a promise.

“Coach,” he said, “I promise I’ma get you there. I promise I’ma get you to the Final Four.”

Or rather, he reiterated a promise. It wasn’t the first time Altman heard those words coming from Bell’s mouth. He heard them soon after Bell stepped on campus for the first time in 2014. Before Bell left, he said, he would get Altman to the pinnacle.

Altman, who is 58 years old, and who has been coaching college basketball for 37 years, would sometimes chide Bell, reminding him of the promise. “I’m getting old,” he’d joke. But Bell, heading into his junior year, reassured Altman.

Eleven-and-a-half months later, he would fulfill the promise in a big way.

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It wasn’t just Brooks. It wasn’t just Bell. Ever since the Ducks recovered from the Elite Eight loss, it became a driving force behind much of what they did.

“That loss has fueled us,” junior guard Casey Benson says. “Not wanting to have that feeling again has fueled us.”

Shortly after the loss, Benson was back home in Arizona, and one day looked up to see a promotional board. The board had a countdown to the 2017 Final Four, which, conveniently, was being held in Phoenix, near Benson’s hometown. So Benson took out his phone, took a picture of the countdown, and sent it to all his teammates on Snapchat.

Throughout the offseason, the Final Four was in the players’ minds, which is nothing unique — dozens of teams think about the same thing every year. But Oregon had something others didn’t; it had the feeling that Brooks and other players ruminated on in that locker room in Anaheim. Everything from that day lingered.

“Every practice, every game, somehow, some way, that came up,” assistant coach Mike Mennenga says of this season. “That lesson was so deeply embedded in our hearts.”

Altman says that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but whether the Oklahoma game was explicitly used as motivation or not, it was implicitly present. It was present as the Ducks ground through offseason workouts, even after Brooks underwent foot surgery in August. It was present after Oregon lost two of its first four games; as it won 17 in a row after Brooks returned; after it lost to lowly Colorado in January. It was even present after a win at Oregon State on the final Saturday of the regular season, a victory that clinched a second straight Pac-12 title.

But a Pac-12 title wasn’t the ultimate goal.

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