MILWAUKEE -- Marquette University is named for the Jesuit missionary who extensively explored the Mississippi River nearly 350 years ago ... or roughly just before the school's last previous Final Four appearance.

At least, it almost seems that way. This is Marquette's first trip to the Final Four since 1977, that magical year coach Al McGuire described as "seashells and balloons," when the Warriors beat North Carolina the same night "Rocky" beat "Network" for Best Picture, when students celebrated the win by pouring out of the dorms and racing to the lakefront, and when McGuire, wearing his lucky suit, covered his face with his hands and wept after winning his sport's ultimate game in his final game as a coach.

It was also the night when people here stopped having to explain where the heck Marquette is.

"It put Marquette on the map," George Pitman, Marquette (Class of '74), said Sunday during a visit to the school's Alumni Center. "I was traveling at the time for my job, and every time I said I was from Milwaukee, they said, 'Oh, Marquette is in Milwaukee.' Before that, if people thought about Milwaukee, they thought about the breweries. Most people didn't even know where it was.

"And now it has been so long since then that they've forgotten again."

Indeed. More than a quarter-century has passed since Marquette beat North Carolina for the title. McGuire, sadly, is dead. The giant breweries that made Milwaukee famous are almost all gone. "Happy Days" and "Laverne and Shirley" were canceled. Marquette went from independent to Conference USA. Even the team's nickname changed, from Warriors to Golden Eagles.

	MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY
	Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin Founded: 1881 Enrollment: 10,700 Tuition: Approximately $20,000, not including room and board Colors: Navy Blue and Old Gold Private, Catholic

And Sylvester Stallone not only went on to plague us with four sequels to "Rocky," he's working on a fifth.

Like I said, it has been a long time.

But now Marquette is returning to the Final Four, the urban campus at the edge of Milwaukee's downtown is alive, fans are wearing blue and gold everywhere, and some things haven't changed that much after all. Why, Real Chili is still on Wells street, still serving great chili and pretty much only chili. The optional shredded cheese may cost 56 cents now, but it sure doesn't look as if much else could have changed since McGuire's time, including the waitresses' uniforms.

So go on. Pop for the shredded cheese. A Final Four doesn't come along that often, the cheese is only 56 cents and remember what Al used to say. "If the waitress has dirty ankles, the chili is good."

"I like seashells and balloons, ribbons and medals, bare feet and wet grass."
-- Al McGuire

School pride never goes out of style, and that is especially true when it comes to officially licensed T-shirts and sweatshirts.

	After braving the lines for his Marquette gear, Page 2's Jim Caple was able to blend in with the rest of the population.

The line for Final Four T-shirts and general Marquette apparel serpentines throughout the Alumni Center store like the world's longest -- and slowest -- conga line. It's like standing in line at Pirates of the Caribbean, only the wait is even longer and everyone is wearing blue and gold instead of mouse ears. In fact, I appear to be the only one in the store who isn't already wearing enough Marquette clothing to outfit every student in McCormick Hall.

"I don't even know why I'm here," says Tom Neill, the man in line behind me. "It's not like we need any more of this stuff around the house.''

Neill didn't attend Marquette, but he has been a season-ticket holder for the past 19 years (he spent nine years on the waiting list before that). I ask how many pieces of clothing he owns with the Marquette logo and, when this requires too much calculation, I amend the question. Do you own any article of clothing, I ask, that does not have the Marquette logo or the Marquette colors on it somewhere?

"Oh, yeah," he says without missing a beat. "We have a lot of Packers stuff, too."

	CAPLE'S TOUR
	All this week, Page 2's Jim Caple will be visiting the campuses of each of the Final Four schools. He was in Milwaukee on Saturday night, when Marquette stunned heavily favored Kentucky ... so, of course, he took part in the party.

Neill's son, David, is the head ballboy for Marquette. He started with the team five years ago at the bottom of the ladder -- wiping up the sweat from the court -- but worked his way up to rebounding shots during warmups and being in charge of the towels and all the little stuff the team needs on the bench. The best part of the job, he says, is interacting with the players. In fact, just last weekend he found himself relaxing in a hot tub with sophomore guard Travis Diener and freshman forward Steve Novak after a victory at the sub-regionals.

Were there any women in that hot tub, I ask? "No," David says. "But there were some around there."

Well, I would hope so.

An exhausting 40 minutes pass Sunday afternoon before I reach the counter to buy a Marquette cap and a gray Marquette T-shirt.

The lines are even longer Monday, which I unfortunately learn when I finally put on my T-shirt and find that I need to exchange it for a larger size.

"I think the world is run by C students."
-- Al McGuire

Marquette does not have a football program, so basketball is the school's passion. It is a passion that extends beyond the beloved Golden Eagles. Across 16th Street from the old gymnasium is the student rec center where there is another basketball tournament so intense that Luther Vandross ought to sing "One Shining Moment" when it ends.

	Team Nike includes a couple former Marquette women's players who can't shake their Basketball Jones.

This is the Marquette's annual campuswide 5-on-5 basketball tournament, though to call it campuswide is a bit of a misnomer, given that some teams take it so seriously they've been known to recruit players from off campus. "You would go to a record store downtown," Marquette alumnus and Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin e-mailed me, "and the 6-8 guy at the counter would suddenly be posting you up the next night."

The tournament is broken down into men's, women's and co-rec divisions, with the sort of team names you would expect from college students -- the Brawdzillas, the Frank Stallone Italian Armada, Golden Seagulls, Chia Pets, Sofa Kingdom and one team named Trey Wingo.

The Chia Pets lost their Sunday night game to Team Nike, a squad that includes two former players on the Marquette women's team, guard Kristi Johnson and forward Kristin Seffern, plus sprinter Jennifer Batie. The tournament rules allow former players to compete a year after they've finished their collegiate careers, and basketball's call proved too strong for Johnson and Seffern. Play the game long enough, and there is a hollow ache in your gut when your career abruptly ends.

"There is, but most of the people who play college basketball have been playing basketball full-time for 10 years," Johnson said. "So, in a way, it's like a thousand-pound weight has been lifted from your shoulders. It's nice to be a normal student for once."

Perhaps. Then again, Johnson did write a letter to the school requesting that they make an exception to the rules so that she could play this year. A grip on a basketball goes both ways.

"You can always tell the Catholic schools by the length of the cheerleaders skirts."
-- Al McGuire

Marquette is a Jesuit school and there are reminders of this throughout campus, including a lovely, 500-year-old chapel dedicated to Joan of Arc barely a 3-point shot from the old gymnasium. Originally built in France's Rhone Valley, the chapel was dismantled and shipped, stone by stone, to Long Island after World War I, then shipped again to Marquette in 1964, just as McGuire was beginning his first season as coach.

	The memory of Al McGuire literally hangs over Travis Diener and the rest of the Golden Eagles.

The school holds a mass at the small chapel every morning. Ever since the war started in Iraq two weeks ago, a peace candle had burned in front of the altar.

"This candle will burn here until this armed conflict in Iraq has come to an end," a sign reads. "In the midst of a world darkened by the suffering of war, let us bear witness to the light."

As you would expect, the war is as much a topic on campus as the Final Four. Last Tuesday's Marquette Tribune carried four student columns both for and against the war, while Father Greg O'Meara made frequent references to the war during the student mass at Gesu Parish on campus Sunday afternoon.

"As Catholic citizens and as citizens of the United States, we necessarily find ourselves in an uncomfortable place," O'Meara said during his sermon. "We are at war. A number of Marquette students and alumni are now serving in Iraq or waiting to be deployed, and our prayers are with them. We pray for all service men and women and their families. We also pray for the Iraqi people, many of whom have died, many of whom will die.

"The (Pope) has condemned entering this conflict, finding it fails to meet moral criteria for the use of lethal force. So now that the war has begun, what are we Catholics to do? Surely we must not endanger people fighting abroad. But we can and we must work for peace. We can work for humanitarian relief. We can work for diplomatic efforts throughout the world to prevent the suffering caused by war."

Meanwhile, Travis Diener worries about his cousin, Derek. The considerable Diener family will make the trip to New Orleans -- parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins -- with one notable exception. "The only one who won't be there is Derek."

Derek Diener, an Army lieutenant who played basketball at West Point, will spend the Final Four somewhere in Iraq with the Army's Air Defense Artillery. Travis thinks Derek is somewhere near the Iraq border but isn't sure, because the family hasn't heard from his cousin in a month.

"Hopefully, he has seen us advance us to the Final Four, and it's providing some excitement for him," Diener said. "I don't think of myself as a hero. I just play basketball."

"You know what pressure is? It's when the cheerleaders are jumping and you don't notice their breasts."
-- Al McGuire

	A peace candle burns in front of Marquette's 500-year-old chapel.

McGuire died two years ago, but his memory hangs over the school, literally so in the old gymnasium, where the team practices and his name is written in big, bold letters on the 1977 championship banner. His voice also carries on, particularly so during this tournament in those car commercials that replay his call of a last-second winning shot.

McGuire is gone, but you can't avoid him, or the legacy of the 1977 team. As coach Tom Crean says after practice while pointing to the '77 championship logo painted on the court, "We see it everyday."

"You never get sick of it," Crean said of the considerable attention paid to McGuire and the '77 champions. "Some of the most pressure I ever felt -- and it was all self-imposed -- was when the '77 team was here for the 25th anniversary. You don't want to let down champions. That team did a lot for Marquette. People who left here have their degrees and their diplomas and the memories of when they were here, but what they remember most is that team."

There were a lot of lean years after the '77 championship, but Crean has returned Marquette to national prominence since taking over the team four seasons ago. This year he posted a photo of the Superdome in the locker room at the beginning of the season and had all the players sign it. During a road trip to Tulane in January, he took the team on a tour of the stadium, making sure to point out the locker rooms that could be theirs if they played well enough.

"I didn't walk in and act like I was dreaming," Crean says of his thoughts when he began rebuilding the program back into a Final Four team. "Who knows what will happen when you set out on a road?"

That's the beauty of sports. Who knows? One day you can be wiping players' sweat off the floor, and another you can find yourself relaxing with them in a hot tub. One day you can be grousing about the team changing its nickname, and another you can be waiting in a line so long it would make a Russian babushka wince just for the privilege of paying $20 for a Golden Eagles T-shirt. One day you can be signing a photo of the Superdome, and another you can be traveling to the national championship in New Orleans, the city at the mouth of that great American river first explored by a French missionary named Marquette.

One day you can be wondering whether there ever will be another moment so sweet as that night in 1977, and then suddenly you can be heading to the Final Four, and it's a month of seashells and balloons all over again.

Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com.