Area fans were giddy for Miami's Shane Battier (Birmingham Detroit Country Day) and former Fab Five member Juwan Howard, as they each won their first NBA championships last week.
The championship also served as the first for any member of the Fab Five, which was well-documented by Deadspin.
That one championship for the Fab Five is also one more than Duke players of that same era* (former Piston Grant Hill has found the fountain of youth and could get the Blue Devils on the board, however.)
Battier became Duke's third (that's it? really?) NBA champion, but occupied Durham, N.C., long after the days of Hill, Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley. While his predecessors repeated in 1991-92, Battier's lone NCAA title came in 2001, but he did joined an esteemed class of NCAA-NBA champions.
Several of the best NCAA players in history, Chris Webber and Jalen Rose included, involved in multiple head-to-head battles during the Fab Five era that technically never happened, have just one NBA championship ring between them. (As mentioned before, Hill is still on the clock and Howard has yet to announce his almost-certain retirement.)
So, even though each school got a ring Thursday, that accomplishment could be seen as a coup for Fab Five.
Watch Howard and Rose celebrate the Heat's feat. It wasn't exactly "We're gonna shock the world" or "We're going to meet Bill Cosby," but some sort of closure for long-denied Fab Five fans. All of which was set in motion by a guy that never set foot on a college campus, as a student anyway. He finally got a ring, too, as you may have heard.