Tre Jones, Duke’s wise freshman point guard, had put it best on Saturday, referring to the combined 3 points by which Duke had eked out wins in its previous two games. “We are really living the March Madness thing out to the fullest,” he said.

That is how we got where we are. On Saturday in Minneapolis, at the Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium, No. 1 Virginia (33-3) will play No. 5 Auburn (30-9), and then No. 2 Michigan State (32-6) will play No. 3 Texas Tech (30-6).

Auburn lives by the 3-pointer. But it also plays stifling defense, and that prevented its dying by the 3 when it shot poorly in its win over Kentucky. That extra gear will come in handy when the Tigers face Virginia’s pack-line defense, which is specifically good at stopping deep shots. The Spartans-Red Raiders game, meanwhile, should be a slugfest between two extremely physical teams.

Of the Final Four teams, only Michigan State counts among the half-dozen biggest names in the college game, but do not let that fool you. If all these programs do not have the same pedigree, all these individual teams belong.

On Sunday, Auburn Coach Bruce Pearl anointed the Tigers “the Cinderellas of this tournament.” It helped that they had just successively bumped off three of the sport’s most redoubtable blue bloods, Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky. It also helped that Pearl is an enthusiastic salesman (at best; we will be hearing more about the “at worst” of his career over the next week).

If Auburn is the Cinderella, though, that makes this a very loaded field. Auburn won the Southeastern Conference tournament only two weeks ago, and it is the 11th-best team in the country according to the KenPom rankings (Loyola-Chicago was 31st at the same time last year). Michigan State won the Big Ten tournament. Virginia was the Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season co-champion. Texas Tech was co-champion of the Big 12, by several metrics the strongest league in the country this year.