<table> </table> GLENDALE, Ariz. | There comes a moment in every good dream, a hard moment, when you realize that it is only a dream. The moment came for Missouri exactly 26 seconds into its tournament game against Connecticut on Saturday.</p><p>That&#8217;s when Missouri&#8217;s Zaire Taylor drove hard to the basket, attempted a layup, and had it blocked hard by Connecticut&#8217;s Stanley Robinson.</p><p>Understand, that&#8217;s not when Missouri lost the game. No, this would be a full afternoon of punches and counterpunches, sprints and comebacks, big shots and fierce defense. The game story will tell you: Missouri overcame an early deficit and took this game into the final minutes &#8212; the Tigers even led the game for 27 happy seconds in the second half &#8212; and it is only because Connecticut&#8217;s tough players made tough shots and all their free throws in those final minutes that the Huskies won the game 82-75. Yes, the top-seeded Huskies had to will their way to the Final Four. Missouri pushed them hard.</p><p>Still, it seems now as red-eyed Missouri players stare into space, not quite able to believe it&#8217;s over, that it was that first blocked shot that snapped the Tigers out of their happy dream. This season had been beautiful. They were picked to finish seventh in the Big 12. They were supposed to crumble after a surprisingly good start. They were expected to get beaten up by the class teams of the conference like Kansas and Oklahoma. They were called lucky when they beat the three teams placed in front of them in the Big 12 tournament. They were supposed to get exposed when they played a dominant Memphis team.</p><p>They won a school-record 31 games, and faced Connecticut for a shot at the Final Four.</p><p>&#8220;We came from nothing,&#8221; Missouri senior Matt Lawrence would say, and those four words would make a good title for the book. The Tigers came from nothing and kept on winning, and you can give all the basketball reasons &#8212; they had versatile big men, they had tough guards, they had a deep bench, they deeply believed in coach Mike Anderson&#8217;s 40-minutes-of-hell system &#8212; but there was something else, something that Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun tried to describe about his own team after Saturday&#8217;s game.</p><p>&#8220;We seem to find a way to win basketball games,&#8221; Calhoun said. &#8220;That seems to be the one ingredient that&#8217;s very difficult to describe. It is the grit of this team, and it is the will to find a way. Some teams have it. You can&#8217;t describe it. You can&#8217;t talk about it. But it is there or, quite frankly, it is not there.&#8221;</p><p>Missouri had it too. That, in the end, was what made them so much fun to watch. They never won the same way twice. They rarely had the same hero in back-to-back games. Sometimes it was DeMarre Carroll making his acrobatic shots around the basket, and sometimes it was Leo Lyons making smooth moves between defenders, and sometimes it was Zaire Taylor manning up and slapping away passes, and sometimes it was J.T. Tiller driving without fear into the eye of the defense, and sometimes it was Matt Lawrence launching killer three-pointers at the very moment when the game was in the balance.</p><p>A dream season. And, sure, it felt like it could go on. What was so striking about Missouri&#8217;s upset victory over Memphis on Thursday is that the Missouri players never seemed to think of it as an upset. There seemed no doubt in their minds, from the opening tip, that they were the best team on the floor. They played free, and the Memphis players never knew what hit them.