WASHINGTON — John Beilein's team is on a run. And it seems to be having an awful lot of fun.
And wouldn't you be, too, if you won two basketball games in two days after a harrowing ordeal aboard an airplane sliding off a runway?
That nightmarish aborted takeoff Wednesday in Ann Arbor has been the story of the week so far in the nation's capital, with Michigan making it to D.C. just hours before Thursday's tip.
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All the Wolverines have done since finally getting to Washington is crush Illinois in a 20-point blowout and score an overtime upset of top-seeded Purdue.
March is the month where momentum reigns, and Michigan certainly has some right now.
"I just think the way we were on it, how much momentum we have with our team, we feel like we can do everything," Zak Irvin said after Thursday's win. "Everything is possible for us. Especially getting stops on the defensive end. When we're able to do that, it makes us a very dangerous team."
While the scary situation aboard that plane has dominated the talk around Michigan this week, its season was changed long before.
Big Ten
The run the Wolverines are on dates back much longer than Thursday. Michigan entered this tournament with wins in nine of its final 13 regular-season games and became one of the conference's hottest teams after an ugly showing against Illinois in Champaign. The Wolverines' defense, which was atrocious early in the season, was especially atrocious that night, leading to some bulletin-board comments from some Illini players.
Michigan has obviously taken that to heart and been a much better defensive team over the past several weeks. That showed Friday, with the Wolverines forcing 15 turnovers, keeping Big Ten Player of the Year Caleb Swanigan in relative check and not letting Purdue do the same kind of damage they were doing with second-chance opportunities. Michigan grabbed 11 offensive rebounds, Purdue grabbed 10. But the Wolverines scored 18 second-chance points compared to the Boilermakers' six.
"Our kids early in the year, there was a lot of speculation about their defense. There should have been. We were not a good defensive team," Beilein said. "The growth, our success over this last month and a half, is in direct correlation to how our defense has improved. That was a great display today against a team that has a lot of options."
"I think the backstretch of the Big Ten, we finally changed our mentality on the defensive end. It just changed our whole season," Irvin said. "We're playing real connected right now. We just got to do that going forward."
Michigan hasn't necessarily played like a No. 8 seed the past few weeks. This was its second win over Purdue in five games. In the two wins leading up to Friday's bout, the Wolverines beat Nebraska and Illinois by a combined 56 points.
And so plenty believed a run in this tournament was possible. But now just two wins away from a Big Ten Tournament championship, Michigan could become one of those teams that takes this momentum into the NCAA tournament. Maybe you should expect the Wolverines to be a popular pick in your bracket pool next week.
"It's happened to us," Beilein said when asked about teams that get hot at the perfect time. "It's happened to us at Michigan. It's happened prior in my coaching career. It's just this time of the year, you're trying to keep everybody fresh. I think it bodes well for a team that really has no agenda, really loves each other, because other teams have very little time to prepare for you. You have very little time to prepare for them. If you have a high IQ team that is passionate about Michigan, passionate about their teammates, it's much easier to coach them. It can be a lot of fun.
"We've been selling the fun of a run. It's really irreplaceable in their lives, really. You throw in what happened on Wednesday, now they got a lot of memories. We don't want it to stop."