Arizona basketball's Final Four run hits home for this Tucsonan | Justin Spears

The Arizona Wildcats are in the Final Four. 

The air feels refreshing, the birds are loudly chirping, everyone is happy and there's just a feeling of excitement and anxiousness that has only occurred five times — the first since 2001, when Magic Carpet Golf was a thriving business. 

For the first time in over two decades, Final Four T-shirt stands are scattered across the UA area — and even some parts in central Tucson. Hundreds of people — maybe a thousand — showed up to McKale Center on a Wednesday morning to watch the team board a bus for the airport. 

At the team sendoff, Arizona basketball fans from all walks of life — some of them skipping school — gathered at McKale to cheer on their boys as they travel to Indianapolis. The boys who have won the most games in program history and have represented the UA and Tucson with grace on the national stage.

Those guys are representing Tucsonans. It didn't matter if you grew up near 12th Avenue or Sunrise Drive, it didn't matter if you're right- or left-leaning — blue or red — in politics, Arizona men's basketball has bonded Tucson for decades.

From the moment they rallied in the second half to beat Purdue on Saturday to now, Tucson has been in basketball heaven, and it could be amplified if all goes well for the Wildcats in Indianapolis this weekend. 

For those who don't know me, I'm Justin Spears. I'm a proud Tucson native, and I've lived here since, well, 1997, the same year Lute Olson coached the Wildcats to their first national championship. My family (my parents and older brother) moved here from Huntington Beach, California, for my father's job at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. 

My professional sports allegiance is to the Los Angeles Lakers, L.A. Chargers (then in San Diego) and the L.A. Dodgers (ducks for cover). But growing up in Tucson, it was easy to be engulfed by the passion and love for the hometown Wildcats. I didn't care for any of the other Arizona teams; I only followed the Cats. 

The first Arizona team I followed was the 2000-01 national runner-up team, which had Gilbert Arenas, Jason Gardner, Richard Jefferson, Luke Walton, Loren Woods and Michael Wright. Between Duke guard Jay Williams fouling Gardner and my brother being an honorary "dookie" as a Shane Battier fan, that sparked my beef with Duke.

I was nearly 6 years old during the 2001 national championship. That was my first memory of watching Arizona basketball. That was also the last time they were in the Final Four — and I'm turning 31 in July. 

Arizona basketball has always been a huge part of my life. I gravitated towards Salim Stoudamire more than anyone. His swagger, his attitude, his cooler-than-everybody aura, it's something I tried to capture as a young basketball player. 

During commercial breaks of Arizona basketball games, I'd race outside to the driveway to shoot 3-pointers and pretend to be Stoudamire. When the Wildcats had the meltdown in the 2005 Elite Eight against Illinois, I grabbed the phonebook (ask your parents about those, kids) and combed through the yellow pages to find the phone number and address for Stoudamire, Channing Frye and Hassan Adams, so I could call them to tell them, like Robin Williams in "Good Will Hunting," "It's not your fault." 

Obviously, I had no luck finding their contacts, because I was a naive fourth-grader. Little did I know that would be one of many disappointing finishes by an Arizona basketball team in the NCAA Tournament — and a 25-year Final Four drought.  

Sure, there were plenty of iconic postseason moments for Arizona in those 25 years, like the dunk fest by Derrick Williams in the 2011 Sweet 16 against Duke, or the second-round thriller against TCU in Tommy Lloyd's first season as Arizona's head coach.

But this basketball-crazy Arizona fan base knows this program should be contending for a spot in the Final Four, because they've seen it before.

There's a portion of the Arizona fan base that attended home games at "Bear Down Gym" long before McKale Center was even built. They've seen everything from coaching changes, to Sean Elliott changing the program, to a 25-year NCAA Tournament streak, to a federal investigation into the program, to season-ending losses to teams like Buffalo, Princeton, Xavier, Santa Clara and East Tennessee State — all double-digit seeds, by the way. Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker are villains in Tucson for what they did to Arizona in the 2014 and ’15 Elite Eights. 

Arizona basketball, despite being considered arguably the best West Coast program in college basketball, has endured a lot over the last two-plus decades, including the loss of Olson. The last time Arizona was in the Final Four, Olson was on the sidelines. He would've had red-carpet treatment this weekend in Indianapolis if he was still with us. 

This Final Four run is for Lute. 

It's for the blue-collar workers who listen to Brian Jeffries' radio broadcast while they work. 

It's for the family members who introduced their kids to Arizona basketball, and then their kids repeated the cycle and multiple generations of UA fans were created. 

It's for Stoudamire, Frye, Adams, Mustafa Shakur, Williams, Momo Jones, Kevin Parrom, Solomon Hill, Nick Johnson, T.J. McConnell, Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, Stanley Johnson, Kaleb Tarczewski and Brandon Ashley — who all led the Wildcats to the Elite Eight and fell a game short of making the Final Four. 

It's for the folks who travel to Arizona road games and invade away venues by chanting "U of A" so loud, it can be heard on the television broadcasts. 

It's for Tucson. 

Personally, the 9-year-old who desperately wanted to be Stoudamire felt the emotions of Arizona fans.

As a sports writer, I take pride in having journalistic integrity. Just because my degree is from the University of Arizona and I grew up in Tucson, you won't ever see me in public wearing the "Block A." You won't ever catch me cheering with a press credential around my neck. And if I have to write about a Wildcat playing poorly or someone getting arrested, I'm going to do it. It's part of the job. 

The running joke on "Spears & Ali," our radio show and podcast on ESPN Tucson, is that I won't admit being an Arizona fan. I dodge the accusations the same way Michael Keaton denies using TLC references when talking to his police officers in "The Other Guys."

As long as I'm the UA football beat writer for Tucson.com and the Star, I will always maintain objectivity when covering the Wildcats and other Arizona sports — basketball, too. But for a moment, after Arizona punched its ticket to the Final Four by beating Purdue, the kid who flipped through a phonebook to call Salim Stoudamire after an Elite Eight loss surfaced for a moment. 

Watching Jaden Bradley, Brayden Burries, Koa Peat, Tobe Awaka and Ivan Kharchenkov high-five fans outside McKale Center at 1:30 in the morning after flying in from San Jose last week, the joy and relief from the fans was palpable. It was an exhale following a 25-year inhale.

As someone who has lived in Tucson during that stretch, the jubilation from Arizona fans has resonated with me. 

Again, I'm not supposed to be a fan, but I think I speak on behalf of Tucson when I say, hell yeah, the Arizona Wildcats are in the Final Four. It's about damn time.