CHAMPAIGN — Anybody who watched Illinois basketball great Dee Brown do his thing 20 years ago already knows which one day he’d take back if he could.
“The one that’s going to haunt you forever,” he said.
The one with every damn thing on the line, the national championship game against blue-blood North Carolina. Those Illini — still the Big Ten’s best team since Michigan State won it all in 2000 — fell 75-70 for only their second loss of a record-tying 37-win season.
Powered by the unmatched guard trio of Brown, Deron Williams and Luther Head, the Illini started 29-0 before finally losing — by a measly point — on a late three-point shot at Ohio State in the regular-season finale. Ranked No. 1 for over three months, they romped to Big Ten regular-season and tournament titles, led the nation in assists, nailed the second-most threes, were as efficient on defense as they were on offense and, you’d better believe it, became the closest thing to rock stars as there were in college basketball.
The fun never stopped … until it did against the Tar Heels on April 4, 2005, in St. Louis.
The “big-boy trophy,” as Brown calls it, was supposed to have gone to the good guys in orange. They’d already accomplished every other imaginable goal, often in spectacular fashion.
“I was checking all the boxes, but I didn’t check the last one when we got down to winning it all,” Brown said. “It happens, but it’s something you think about a lot.”
More than enough sometimes, especially on a night like Friday.
“I don’t want to be sad today,” he said. “I want to be as happy as I can. [But] people don’t want to let that die down. They want to keep drilling you on it and keep telling you and reminding you, which is fine. We had a chance to win a national championship, so that was a blessing.”
Another blessing came at Memorial Stadium, where Illinois’ back-to-back Big Ten championship basketball teams of 2003-04 and 2004-05 gathered for a reunion before the No. 12-ranked football team’s season opener against Western Illinois. According to Brown, it was the first time they’d all been together since their college days. Head, the team’s leading scorer, couldn’t make it, but Brown, Williams, James Augustine, Roger Powell Jr., coach Bruce Weber and many others — among them current Illini coach Brad Underwood — were on hand, with family present in abundance.
The best walk in town.
Welcome back the 2004-05 team for their team reunion! pic.twitter.com/2iQ1idt1wg
— Illinois Men’s Basketball (@IlliniMBB) August 29, 2025
This was no solemn occasion. Quite the opposite.
“These were some of the funnest years of my life, for sure,” said Williams, who went on to become a three-time All-Star in the NBA. “The friendships, the camaraderie that we had here, we had something special. It’s hard to top those years.”
If Williams could live another day as an Illini, there wouldn’t even be a game on the court. He’d just sit around with Brown, Head and Jerrance Howard, “talk [expletive]” and play cards like they used to.
“On the court, it was fun, man,” Williams said, “but off the court, it was just as fun.”
Weber still marvels at a coaching experience he calls “just amazing.” Shortly before she died in March of 2005 — while the Big Ten tournament was going on — Weber’s dear mother, Dawn, put it even better when she told him the season had been “like a fairy tale.”
The loss at the end still gnaws at Weber sometimes, though.
“I think we were the better team,” he said. “I always wish [Augustine] wouldn’t have had all the foul trouble. Obviously, a lot of people talk about the officials. I try not to complain about them.”
Yes, he tries. Most of the time. But Augustine, an excellent big man, fouled out in nine minutes of action in the title game, and where was the justice in that? The Illini fan who long ago mailed Weber a photo of a toilet sure wasn’t OK with it.
“In her letter, she wrote, ‘Look at the toilet closer,’ ” Weber recalled, laughing. “There was a gold plaque with the names of the three officials on the toilet. She said, ‘Every time I you-know-what, I think of those three.’ ”
Augustine had no problem reflecting on a night that wasn’t exactly on the list of his favorites.
“At the beginning, it was kind of difficult to get over,” he said. “It’s not the best time of your life, where you’re in the biggest game and you foul out.”
He can smile about it now. Although, in full disclosure, “I’ve never watched a North Carolina game again,” Augustine added.
Augustine, Williams and Brown (Proviso East) are all 41 now. Head, an ex-Public League star (Manley) who had a decent run of it in the NBA, is 42. Weber, no longer coaching, is 68. Where does the time go?
Twenty years ago in St. Louis, the Illini erased a 40-27 halftime deficit and had glory in their sights. It was a 70-70 game with a couple of minutes to go. Williams had two shots at the lead. Head had another, plus a shot to tie it at 73 a bit later. None of those four shots went down. These things happen.
“Certain chances come only once in a lifetime,” the Sun-Times’ Rick Telander wrote that night. “You can never take them again. And you just live with what could have been.”
It was as great a time as there has been for Illinois basketball. Better times for newspapers, too. I dug through the archives for Sun-Times stories from that Final Four and lost count at eight different writers’ bylines. Or maybe it was nine. Mind-blowing, either way.
Brown is coach at Roosevelt University these days.
“I love it,” he said. “It’s the best thing ever.”
Almost. Brown still dreams about hooping inside Assembly Hall, now called State Farm Center, but not by him.
“I think about that place and what it sounds like,” he said. “You ask me what I miss? I miss the sound of that place. It made me feel like I couldn’t lose.”