As the decade winds down, The Dagger will celebrate the past 10 years of college basketball with various top 10 lists. Today, we at look at the 10 best games of the 2000s:

10. Villanova 78, Pittsburgh 76 -- Regional Final, 2009 NCAA tournament

The Big East battle featured six lead changes in the final six minutes, game-tying free throws with 5.3 seconds on the clock and the memorable Scottie Reynolds near-buzzer beater that catapulted Villanova to its first Final Four since 1985.

9. Duke 98, Maryland 96 (OT) -- Regular season, 2001

With 54 seconds left, the Terps helped a 10-point lead over the No. 2 Blue Devils. Fourteen seconds later, the lead was two, thanks to eight points from Jason (don't call him Jay) Williams. Duke eventually tied it up and the game went to overtime where, amazingly, Maryland didn't fold and had a chance to win at the end. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the catalyst for the comeback: a bogus fifth foul on Steve Blake, who had blanketed Williams on defense all night.

8. Connecticut 79, Duke 78 -- National semifinal, 2004 NCAA tournament

Duke led by eight with four minutes to go, but UConn scored 12 straight to close out the game (save for a garbage-time three by Chris Duhon). Emeka Okafor scored 18 points in the second half after sitting for nearly the entire first session because of two quick fouls.

7. Oklahoma State 64, St. Joseph's 62 -- Regional final, 2004 NCAA tournament

Never before had a No. 1 seed been as disrespected as St. Joe's, but the 30-1 squad came within a jumpshot of the Final Four.

6. Gonzaga 109, Michigan State 106 (3OT) -- Regular season, 2005

Even though it took place the day before Thanksgiving in a small gym in Maui, this game had all the intensity of a Final Four contest and was played even better. Jim O'Connell wrote for the Associated Press after the game: "If the game was played in March instead of late November, it would have gone down as one of the sport's all-time classics. It still should."

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Nope. It's a ballroom. And it's where Kentucky, Stanford, Virginia, and the rest of the Cancun Challenge participants are, yes, dancing. (Sorry.)

From Kentucky Sports Radio comes these floor-level photos of the Cancun Challenge's floor, which has been imported and placed in the midst of a big ballroom with all the ballroom-y fixings: chandeliers, marble columns, that weird brown wallpaper you see everywhere in Las Vegas -- the works. 

Kentucky players have been complaining about the dead spots and cracks in the floor, which are probably par for the course when you stick a basketball court in the middle of a ballroom. But hey, look on the bright side. At least they'renot playing on this.

No one expected much from the Pac-10 this year. It's a down year. UCLA isn't dominant. USC is bombed out and depleted. California and Washington are the conference's two leading lights, and while they should be plenty good on their own, when the national reputation of your conference is riding on that duo, you're probably not in great shape.

That said, the Pac-10's start has been even worse than imagined. After Oregon's loss to Montana last night, SB Nation's Sean Keeley took stock of the damage. It is not pretty:

It would be curious enough if Montana's upset of Oregon tonight happened in and of itself.  But when you compound it with UCLA's stunning loss to Cal-State Fullerton, Cal's getting taken behind the woodshed by Syracuse and Ohio State, Stanford losing to San Diego and Oral Roberts as well as USC dropping a game to crosstown smallfry Loyola Marymount, it makes for an extremely depressing start to the season for the conference.

Again, looking the conference up and down reveals only one team that seems primed for a national run, and that's Washington. (It would follow that Washington has yet to lose a disappointing early-season game thus far.) Cal is probably a half-step below. UCLA will be fine, but they won't be UCLA. After that, what do you have? Arizona is talented but rebuilding in their first year under Sean Miller. Arizona State is missing Jeff Pendergraph and lottery pick James Harden, who is busy doing things like this in the NBA. Washington State could be all right, but it too is in the midst of a coaching transition. Yahoo!'s Rivals previews actually slotted Oregon State, a team that went 0-18 in the conference just three years ago, at No. 5 in the conference. All due respect to the Beavers, but that has as much to do with their improvement as the Pac-10's collective decline.

Still, though, this start is worse than predicted. These teams should not be losing to Loyola Marymount and San Diego and Oral Roberts and Cal-State Fullerton. It's just November; there's plenty of time for the West Coast to turn things around. But right now? The Pac-10? Not so much.

The Hunt for the Most Interesting Team in the World is the Dagger's 2009-10 countdown preview series. Check out the overriding principles here.

Last year's record: 22-11, 9-9 Big Ten

2009-10's toughest games: at Butler, at Purdue, at Michigan State, at Michigan

Primary attraction: Tubby Smith leads a quietly rabid Minnesota fan base back into the national conversation. But for how long?

Three items of undeniable interest:

1. Tubby Smith's precarious position. Gophers fans love Tubby Smith. Tubby Smith should love Gophers fans. After all, Smith was expelled from Kentucky for too many just-OK seasons in a row, a rare feat for a fan base who watched that same coach win a national title not all that long ago. But where Kentucky's fans expect everything, Minnesota's fans are more than happy with what Tubby's got going right now: A consistently improving program that can compete night in and night out with some of the best teams in the country, and that seems all but a lock to return to the NCAA title again this season. If he keeps this up, Tubby could probably stay at Minnesota forever. But does he want to? Smith was the subject of some Alabama-related rumors last offseason, and those were not the first in his Gopher tenure. Does Tubby really want to be in Minnesota? And if not, why not?

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Josh Pastner doesn't drink. Josh Pastner doesn't smoke. Josh Pastner never "tried caffeine." Josh Pastner is a freak.

Those are the only conclusions to be drawn from this Associated Press report, which details Pastner's rise in coaching and his rather insane regimen, which involves no booze, no caffeine and, consequently, no fun of any sort.

Pastner, the new Memphis coach, says he has never sipped alcohol, smoked a cigarette, tried caffeine or drunk a soda. He is no goody two-shoes; he is just the coaching equivalent of a gym rat. [...] “He’s always said he would want to tell his players if he wants to be a role model for his players, he would want to make sure what he told them, he lived so he decided never to drink alcohol, and we never gave him soda,” Hal Pastner said.

I don't want to get too hung up on the chemical ingestion thing. There are some other good nuggets in this piece, which, despite being a little puffy, does have some fun anecdotal stuff that manages to make Josh Pastner look pretty cool. For example, Pastner almost got cut from his freshman year basketball team; he was the team's MVP by the time he was a senior. That sort of thing.

But this whole no-caffeine thing just blows my mind. I can see not drinking. If you're a wunderkind like Pastner, who has been coaching since he was 15 or so, I can see deciding not to drink at a young age (true story: I did the same) and following through on that as you make your rise in coaching. That sort of makes sense.

Caffeine, though. Sweet, life-giving caffeine. Mmm. This I find harder to believe. Is there a single college basketball coach in this country not wired on at least 150 grams of caffeine right now? Caffeine comprises nearly 75 percent of any Division 1 coaches bloodstream at any given time. This is just the way things work. We're to believe that Pastner manages to recruit alongside these men -- and recruit well -- without any jitter-juice in brain space?

Sure, it's possible. Some people are just freaks. Josh Pastner is a head coach at Memphis at 31, so he qualifies for consideration. Or maybe the AP is just a little too credulous toward Pastner's self-descriptions. You tell me which is more likely.

The Cram Session is a semi-daily melange of last night's most important hoops action.

Purdue 73, Tennessee 72: Monday night's U.S. Virgin Islands Paradise Jam action gave us several things. Among them? Commercial after commercial of why I should visit the Virgin Islands, to the point where talking the dog for a walk in otherwise-pleasant 45 degree Chicago weather suddenly made me feel like a chump. Oh, and it also gave us the best basketball game of the year so far. That game was No. 7 Purdue's one-point win over No. 10 Tennessee, and it wasn't just that the game was close that made it great; both teams are already playing pretty great basketball, especially on the defensive end. It was thrilling to watch.

The game flow chart here ought to give you some idea of how close the game was. Neither team ever opened a significant lead. Both teams pressured the ball all game -- Tennessee's flying full court pressure is going to give plenty of teams fits -- and despite a whistle-happy referee, the physicality never waned. I hope you watched it. It was just that good.

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Ha! Just kidding. Of course you've got Texas.

No, the interesting thing here is not which team will win -- Texas will, easily -- but the margin of victory therein. In past years, Iowa keeps this competitive. At the best times in the Steve Alford era, they might even have beaten some of Rick Barnes' Texas teams.

These are not the best times for Iowa. After three of Todd Lickliter's best players (the term best being used relatively here, because Iowa was bad in 2008-09, too), things are looking very down for Iowa. The Hawkeyes are 1-2 on the young season. The season debut was a loss to Texas-San Antonio by 12 at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. The next game was also at CHA, when Iowa lost 52-50 to Duquesne. The Hawkeyes managed to bounce back and handily beat Bowling Green on Friday night, but those two early losses don't bode well. And any observer can look at the 2009-10 Hawkeyes and see a team made up of sophomore Matt Gatens and absolutely nothing else.

Meanwhile, Texas is ranked No. 3 in the country. They're loaded with returning and transferred talent, and have one of the best recruiting classes in the country. In other words, they're Texas.

Which means there's an awfully good chance Iowa gets absolutely crushed. The current Vegas odds -- not that anyone would gamble on collegiate sports, of course -- have Iowa at +15.5, which seems drastically low. Texas could win by 40. The disparity in talent is just that great.

So, go ahead, math whizzes. Predict the final outcome in the comments, and get a respectful nod from yours truly after the fact if you manage to call the final score correctly. Either way, this could get ugly.

The Hunt for the Most Interesting Team in the World is the Dagger's 2009-10 countdown preview series. Check out the overriding principles here.

Last year's record: 23-13, 9-7 SEC

2009-10's toughest games: at UCLA, Kentucky, at LSU, Tennessee

Primary attraction: As Rick Stansbury deals with Renardo Sidney (or the lack thereof), can the Bulldogs fulfill their promise?

Three items of undeniable interest:

1. Re-nar-do! Re-nar-do! Re. Nar. Dooooooo! Uh, Renardo? Much of the 2009-10 season will hinge on whether Rick Stansbury's great gambit -- signing Renardo Sidney amidst eligibility suspicions after Sidney's attempts at landing at USC and UCLA failed -- works or not. Thus far, things aren't looking good. The Bulldogs are two games into the 2009-10 season, and Sidney is still ineligible. The NCAA wants more documents from the Sidney family in order to prove they weren't receiving money for their mortgage while they lived in California; meanwhile, Sidney's lawyer, Don Jackson, seems more intent on making a name for himself than doing right by his client, whose best interests involve playing basketball as soon as possible. Whether Sidney can't get eligible and Jackson knows it or Jackson is merely stalling in an attempt to raise his own profile is as yet unknown. What is known is that the Bulldogs need Sidney, and Sidney needs the Bulldogs. They need each other, and soon.

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Sports Illustrated's Grant Wahl -- one of the better college hoops writers working, which you probably already know -- has a pretty interesting breakdown of John Calipari's entree into Kentucky basketball this season. You should totally read it. It covers all the usual bases (Calipari's popularity, his recruiting class, his troubled exit from Memphis). But it focuses most of its time on the relationship between Calipari and Louisville coach Rick Pitino.

You may have known these two supposedly hate each other, but did you know ...

• That Rick Pitino initially recommended John Calipari for the UMass job and paid $5,000 out of his own pocket to make sure the Minutemen athletic director at the time sealed the deal?
• That John Calipari first met Rick Pitino as a teenage camper at Five-Star camp in Pittsburgh?
• That before he took the Kentucky job, Calipari called Pitino and asked the coach what he thought? And that Pitino told him to take it?
• That Kentucky fans are sort of crazy?

OK, so you knew that last one all too well. But the other three speak to a more complex relationship between the two coaches than what you've heard. For his part, Calipari insists he's on friendly terms with Pitino, and clearly the two do share some sort of bond. But whatever similarities bring them together -- the Armani suits, the slicked-back hair, the stints in the NBA -- they also clearly brush up against one another the wrong way.

Fortunately, we millenials have devised a word for this: frenemy. That's totes (totally, natch [naturally, duh]) what Calipari and Pitino are. They like each other and they wear the same clothes, but they'd also like to punch each other in the face on occasion. Frenemies forever, y'all!

Because through a week or so of hoops, your team has the best resume in college basketball, and no one can take that away from you.

It was just a few weeks ago that Syracuse fans were lamenting a loss to Division II LeMoyne in an exhibition game. Friday night, they watched as the Orange not only beat but beat up North Carolina, the No. 4 team in the country. This win was just after Syracuse's demolition of the No. 12-ranked Cal Bears. Neither game was close, and if ESPN didn't have those little numbers next to each team's name during broadcasts, casual viewers could be forgiven for thinking the Orange were the best team in the country. For two nights, they looked the part.

Are Syracuse fans appropriately excited? Why, yes. Yes they are. Allow Sean at Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician to show you the ways:

We're really f***king good, you guys.

See? Told you they were jacked.

Honestly, right now there isn't a team with a better resume so far than the Orange.  Because of the stupid preseason polls and the way everyone is a moron about them, the Orange will end up ranked No. 12 or something like that on Monday.  But as far as I'm concerned, they're the No. 1 team in the nation.  Kansas, Duke, Michigan State...they haven't done jack sh*t compared to Wes Johnson and the Orange.

Speaking of Wes...wow.  The rumors?  True.  The potential?  There.  The excitement?  Palpable.

Yes, 'Cuse fans are mighty pleased, as they should be. Their favorite college basketball team is your Week 1 winner -- and a pretty good argument for waiting to rank college hoops teams until the fourth or fifth week of the season. Oh well. The basketball is good enough.