When Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth arrived at the school in the summer of 1997, 95 percent of sales of the Bulldogs' licensed merchandise were generated by the modest campus bookstore.

"There was a really limited selection," Roth said. "If you wanted something with our logo on it, you'd have to buy it at the bookstore. You really couldn't get it anywhere else. You couldn't even find it in town."

Twenty years later, Gonzaga merchandise is commonly seen in sporting goods stores across the country, with the Spokane, Washington-based school's gear as accessible to retailers as other big Nike basketball schools like Duke and Michigan.

The school's first Final Four run has Gonzaga on pace to beat its all-time high from 10 years ago, when the Bulldogs generated a royalty of $319,000 through the gross sales of $3.7 million in gear that year.

An official with Fanatics, the largest seller of licensed sports merchandise in the country, said Thursday that, over the past six days, Gonzaga was the best selling of the Final Four schools in 11 U.S. states, behind only UNC's 25 and ahead of both Oregon (9) and South Carolina (5).

"Over the years, Gonzaga has become a perennial college basketball powerhouse," said Jack Boyle, Fanatics' president of merchandising.

Boyle said the school has seen an 800 percent spike in merchandise sales this week, the best among Final Four schools, and Washington has become the best-selling state overall for college basketball gear since the team clinched its berth Saturday.

When Gonzaga sprang on the scene with an Elite Eight run in 1999, the school was barely equipped to handle the demand. Just a year before, it had redesigned the Bulldogs logo, but who could be ready for the onslaught?

"We had to scramble to get orders out," Roth said. "It was a nightmare."

By 2000, stores in Spokane started regularly carrying Gonzaga gear, and merchandise royalties hit $44,000 off $554,000 in sales at retail.

Over the coming years, Gonzaga signed on with Collegiate Licensing Company, which managed its relationship with product makers and vendors, and Nike started making a greater variety of gear to meet what became national demand by 2003.

"Into the middle 2000s is when we saw a huge surge of support, and we really became, as [SportsCenter's] Neil Everett says, 'America's Team,'" said Chris Standiford, the chief operating officer for Gonzaga athletics.

The revenue that Gonzaga will pull in this year will still be dwarfed by the other three schools that are in the Final Four, mostly because Gonzaga doesn't have a football team, which is often a marketing juggernaut.

IMG College, which owns CLC, says that Gonzaga licensing revenues are ahead of only one Power 5 school: Wake Forest.

But the story isn't just about where the school is now. It's where it came from.

In 1997, the bookstore carried a couple of T-shirts and a hat or two. Today, next to the bookstore is a Zags Shop, with 17,500 square feet full of racks of merchandise. It opened in 2013 to accommodate the future. But if the Zags win the title, even that space might not suffice.