Purdue will play for a national championship on Monday.

The sentence is so fantastical that it bears repeating: Purdue will play UConn for a national championship on Monday!

Nope, still doesn’t quite feel real. Perhaps by then, when the Boilermakers attempt to win their first NCAA era title, the reality will set in. Until tip, however, you might have give a little grace to those who’ve watched the program long enough to feel that this magical ride to the title game goes against everything they’ve ever known. In March, things are supposed to go haywire, right? Well, this year, Purdue survived March — thrived even — and April has brought about something entirely new. Saturday night, what arrived for the Boilermakers was a hard-fought, business-like (and a bit choppy) 63-50 victory over upstart NC State in the national semifinal in Glendale, Ariz.

And now, Purdue gets the opportunity to go from NCAA embarrassment, when it was unceremoniously ousted from the tourney by a 16-seed, to NCAA royalty. In order to do so, it will have to take down the sport’s reigning king, UConn, which ran away late from Alabama in the other semifinal.

Would a title erase the hardships? No, but it would certainly fade them into the background. Already, it feels like the weight of the past 40 years has been lifted, and boy was that a lot of weight, seemingly every roadblock building on top of the last. The 3 straight losses to double-digit seeds, the last to 16 FDU last season, was an incredibly frustrating burden, even for those sitting outside the program. Imagine for those inside? The players, the coaches, the administration? Managers? Support personnel? Hell, the Mackey parking attendants? It must have felt an unbreakable burden.

Yet, Purdue broke through. The Boilermakers played one of their worst games of the season on Saturday night, with 16 turnovers and only 40% shooting, but their defense made the trip from West Lafayette to the Phoenix suburbs, and that (along with timely 3-point shooting) was plenty to knock off the Wolfpack.

Over the past week, there’s been an overwhelming sense of relief. Immediately after the Midwest Region final win over Tennessee, former Boilermaker Robbie Hummel had trouble keeping his composure on the Westwood One radio broadcast, saying aloud what everyone was thinking, “I can’t believe this is finally happening” then fighting (and losing) to hold back tears while talking to Matt Painter.

Hummel, more than anyone else, knows the pain — emotional and physical — of the Boilermakers over the years, because he’s lived it. His knee injuries might have kept Purdue from this opportunity nearly 15 years ago. Hours after the game, fans turned out in the hundreds to watch the team land last Sunday night after the win over the Vols, hanging out for an extra 90 minutes post the initial anticipated arrival time. The campus and community has been abuzz in what has felt like the longest-week-ever ahead into the Final Four game. In Glendale, Purdue fans seemed to outnumber those of the other 3 schools by at least 4-to-1, perhaps more, a result of Boilermaker fans gobbling up the tickets in bunches; Stubhub said more after-market tickets were sold to those in the state of Indiana than anywhere else combined.

Following the win Saturday night vs. the Wolfpack, students in West Lafayette took to the streets, running around and celebrating on the streets of campus. Purdue and its fans have been hungry for this.

“It’s everything,” guard Fletcher Loyer said of the ticket to the national championship. “It’s everything we’ve worked for. Everything we’ve thought about. A lot of late nights, can’t even sleep because you’re thinking about it. It’s been tough, but we fought and we’re going to keep fighting. We’ve got 40 more minutes ’til we’re national champs, so we’re going to push everybody as far as we can and we’re going to play as hard as we can.”