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Freshman forward Luc Richard Mbah a Moute has given the Bruin faithful a March Madness run filled

Welcome back. For those who spent spring break hiking through Australia’s outback without so much as access to a pay phone, there’s only one thing you need to know about tonight.

It should be your most memorable college experience.

UCLA is playing Florida for the NCAA men’s basketball national championship, and while I’d like to put that in perspective, this newspaper simply doesn’t have the space.

For anyone who has ever camped outside Pauley Pavilion or simply donned a Den T-shirt, it’s pretty easy to understand why tonight’s game is the biggest event to hit campus since, well, the last time the Bruins won the title 11 years ago.

A national championship in college basketball is rarer than an easy engineering course and more coveted than a 1945 bottle of La Tache Burgundy.

Consider this.

There are 334 Division I programs that entertain thoughts of a national championship each year, yet the Bruins are now just one of two teams actually competing for it.

There are approximately 17 million students currently enrolled in American colleges, meaning UCLA students represent just one quarter of 1 percent who might revel in their school’s title.

“This is the biggest stage at the collegiate level,” senior guard Cedric Bozeman said. “That doesn’t just always go for us, it goes for the fans who have been a part of this, especially those that have been with us from the first round until now.”

Some sports fans would give half their limbs and two of their paychecks to be in an environment like Westwood tonight. For UCLA students, it’s simply a matter of returning from spring break on time.

Just how big of an event is this game for UCLA’s campus?

For the Catholic Students Association, it would trump the Pope’s arrival for a Sunday mass.

For the Bruin Republicans, it’d rank right up there with the rebirth of Ronald Reagan in his soon-to-be namesake hospital.

And for Amnesty International, it’d be the equivalent of eliminating all the human rights violations during an informal get-together in Royce Hall.

“It’s my first year and my first everything. It’s supposed to be a learning year,” freshman forward Alfred Aboya said. “To play for a national championship is a dream come true.”

It’s impossible to appreciate the significance of tonight’s game without understanding the context. At a school with the most legendary stature in college basketball, UCLA has been a footnote’s footnote recently.

Just over a decade ago, basketball-crazed students enrolled at UCLA with visions of the 1995 national championship still fresh in their mind. What they ended up seeing was arguably the school’s most embarrassing loss the following year in a first-round NCAA defeat to Princeton.

Four years ago, avid fans were attracted to UCLA and the program’s consistent influx of talented players. What they witnessed was the dismissal of the head coach and two of the worst seasons in the program’s history.

Only the current batch of seniors was around for both those years, and let me tell you, that period made me want to 8-clap my hands over my eyes.

This current team’s restoration of the program in such a short period has been nothing short of miraculous.

Win or lose, it will permanently have a proud and unique place in this school’s rich history.

That’s why, as students, you’ll always remember where you were for tonight’s game.

The memories of tonight will certainly last longer than your 21st birthday or any graduation speech.

Every student goes through those things. Tonight is what makes it so special to be at UCLA.

Finley was a 2005-2006 basketball columnist who plans on sending Ben Howland a personal thank you note. E-mail him at afinley@media.ucla.edu with any comments you’d like him to pass along to the Bruin coach.