The years go by, but 1997 memories stay vivid for Final Four hero Miles Simon

Not, at least, to the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four that season, when the Wildcats wrapped up a remarkable tournament run in which they became the only team ever to beat three No. 1 seeds.

“It does feel like 30 years, as I look at my (teenage) kids and how old they are," Simon said. "And we’re talking about the 90s — and it’s 2026-27. It’s been a long time. But the feeling and all that happened during that stretch has not been forgotten within this group.”

Simon and the rest of the 1997 team will get another taste of that feeling Saturday, when they will be introduced during halftime of the Red-Blue Showcase’s intraquad scrimmage. It would hardly be a surprise if some of them wound up judging the dunk contest or made other appearances, too.

“Our group chat has been fired up over the last few weeks with this happening,” Simon said, thanking UA coach Tommy Lloyd, AD Desiree Reed-Francois and special events director Megan O’Leary. “For our group to be honored and to be coming back, it's so fun. It's going to bring back a lot of great memories. ... For us to all be together in one place, especially in Tucson for the Red Blue game and be around the program, it's going to be a big time thing.”

While the 1997 team’s 30th anniversary won’t actually be until next April, a celebration is being planned now in part because many of them wouldn’t likely be available if it was held during the season: Simon will be running around the country as a television analyst, while Josh Pastner (UNLV), Mike Bibby (Sacramento State) and Jason Terry (Utah Jazz assistant) are coaching.

During a Zoom interview with Arizona media on Monday, Simon discussed the events of that season, then-coach Lute Olson, along with his present-day life.

Among other things, Simon noted that it was hard to envision, at the time, that celebrations would keep happening today.

“I don't think you really have an inkling about it when you're 21 years old, about the gravity of it,” he said. “It’s just so special because there's been so many great Arizona teams, and we're the only national title team.

“We're all very, very grateful for that to not be forgotten and to be remembered in such a positive light. It was a special group, and (coach) Lute Olson is the is the reason why. I think about Lute quite often when I think about this team, and obviously coach Olson will be dearly missed this weekend, and I'm sure many of my teammates think about Lute.”

Since then, many UA teams have been near misses: The 1997-98 team suffered a shocking Elite Eight loss to Utah, while UA lost in the 2001 championship game and couldn’t get past Elite Eights of 2003, 2005, 2011, 2014 and 2015 until last season’s Wildcats reached the Final Four... then suffered a decisive loss to Michigan in the semifinal.

“There's been so many great teams. I thought we were going to win it the next year, 1998, because our team was better. But… it's hard. It's very hard to win it,” he said. “It's very hard to win those six games in a row. This past year's team was so good. The Sean Miller teams (in 2014 and 2015), the Stanley Johnson- and Aaron Gordon-led teams, were so good. The Derrick Williams-led team (2011) was so good. The ’01 team that went to the Final Four. Mustafa Shakur’s team in 2005, when the lead gets blown (15 points in four minutes) against Illinois — you couldn't tell me that that team shouldn't have won the national title.

“It’s just a couple of minutes here, a couple of minutes there, changes your whole fortune in the NCAA tournament.”

Those minutes help change the fortune of a 1997 team that actually only finished fifth in the Pac-10, and lost its final two games of the regular season – even if one of the Wildcats did predict such a thing. As longtime UA fans might guess, that was Pastner, then a walk-on freshman hype machine who provided some of the memories Simon speaks of now.

“Within the first couple months of the school year, he said, ‘Hey, we can win the national title,’ and I'm like, ‘Josh, dude, you're 18 years old. Be quiet. You don’t even know what you're talking about yet.’

“But that came through six months later,” Simon said. “We won it. Those memories are embedded in me forever. All those times just hanging out, in the locker room, talking stuff to each other, playing one-on-one against Mike Bibby and Jason Terry and Michael Dickerson on a daily basis. Coming back late at night. Then when we won it, going around Tucson and being recognized, and the fans just showing this outpouring of love and support.

“It's stuff that I probably took for granted, as a 20, 21, 22-year-old. But now that I reflect back on it many, many times, like people ask me, like, ‘How was it?’ It was pretty freaking awesome, and it's still pretty awesome to this day.”

Simon said Olson’s influence rubbed off on the Wildcats both on and off the floor — “he gave you a sense of how to be professional in all senses of the word,” he said — and that current UA coach Tommy Lloyd has emphasized recruiting high-character players.

“That was a number one trait for Lute Olson,” he said. “When I used to host players on recruiting trips, he would ask all of us when a kid would leave, ‘Hey, how does he fit ?’ We actually had some say, yay or nay, if we didn't like him, and I remember him moving off some high-level recruits because of that.

“From all the things that I've seen around the program the last couple years and the players that are there, Tommy has embodied that wholeheartedly, which is tremendous.

“And on the court, the way they play — they play fast, they play tough, they play super hard. They're very, very unselfish. Last year's was as physical a team as I've ever seen in an Arizona uniform, which was awesome to see, and you just see they really care for one another. They care for the program, and those are the things that you want around Arizona basketball. Tommy's done an awesome job of keeping this program at the top.”

Simon says Arizona fans still say to him “Simon says championship,” the famous phrase Billy Packer used during the final moments of the CBS national title game broadcast.

Maybe someday soon, Simon might get a chance to do the same for somebody else: He said he will work games for Fox, mostly in the Big Ten but probably with some Big 12 and Arizona coverage, while also working for CBS — which owns the rights to the NCAA Tournament.

While Simon has coached at virtually all levels — including a stint at Arizona from 2005-06 to 2007-08 — he said working in broadcasting is allowing him to spend time with his teenage children and serve as a volunteer assistant coach at Orange County’s Mater Dei High School, where he starred earlier in the 1990s.

“It's kind of full circle. It's super fun. I love coaching the young players,” he said. “We have a really talented group this year that'll compete probably for CIF and state title. I help coach my son's seventh-grade AAU team, which is awesome. And then I follow my daughter around. She's s a stud flag football player, probably one of the best wide receivers in the state of California.

“So I just do my dad duties.. and then I just see wherever it's going to take me. I love broadcasting. I love coaching. I love coaching in the NBA. I love coaching in high school. I love coaching my son's seventh grade team. They're all different challenges. They're all fun for me. But broadcasting keeps me around my kids a lot because I really only work the four months out of the year, and then I can do a lot of other things and make sure I'm at as many as their events as possible. Because as you guys know who have kids, once they hit 18, they're not going to be here as much. So it's super important to me to be around my family and my kids and watch their growth and see where see where it takes them.”