Mike Celizic

Anyone still think Cincinnati should have made the NCAA Tournament? How about the assertion that the selection committee included too many mid-major teams that had as much chance of getting out the first round as Dick Cheney has of winning American Idol — still want to argue that one?

Anyone?

George Mason hasn’t won the NCAA championship, but don’t dare say that the little school that could ain’t done nothin’ yet. Because of all the upsets in all the games in all the years of March Madness, what the Patriots have done is as amazing as anything the tournament has ever seen.

It’s hard to call Sunday’s win over top-seeded Connecticut the biggest upset in tournament history. After all, George Mason has yet to hoist the trophy on the first Monday in April. And so far, what Villanova did in 1985, when it won the title as an eighth seed, remains the premier upset.

But George Mason isn’t far behind. The Patriots have won four games so far, and they weren’t supposed to win any of them. They beat Michigan State, North Carolina, Wichita State and now UConn. Before the Sweet 16 round, the Vegas bookies had installed George Mason as a 30-1 shot.

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But all the favorites are now gone; there isn’t a No. 1 seed left to make the trip to Indianapolis. Given the way George Mason has played to this point, there’s no reason to say the Patriots can’t win two more games. Right now, everybody is an underdog, and the biggest underdog of them all is George Mason.

What they’ve done already is amazing. Only once before has a team seeded 11th made it to the Final Four, but that was an established program, LSU, in 1986, and it beat a familiar conference foe, Kentucky, to do it.

March Madness slide shows AP   Title time Best images from Florida-UCLA in men’s championship game. AP   Turtle wax Top images from Maryland’s overtime win over Duke for its first NCAA title. Reuters   The Final Four See images of Saturday's games where four teams become two. Getty Images   Eight is great Click to see images from the Elite Eight round of the 2006 NCAA tournament. Getty Images   Super Sweet 16 The best images from NCAA Tournament's second weekend. AP   Round 1 & 2 Best images from opening weekend of Big Dance.

If LSU was Cinderella, George Mason is Cinderella’s ugly little sister, the girl that even Cinderella locked in the attic so no one would see her. George Mason, a commuter school with four campuses that won’t celebrate its 40^th anniversary until next year, had never won an NCAA Tournament game before this year. What’s more, the Colonial Athletic Association hadn't had a team make it past the NCAA's opening weekend since 1988.

This is a school with no history and even less tradition. If, before the tournament began, you’d have asked in what state George Mason is located, most people — maybe including CBS analyst Billy Packer — couldn’t have told you. Nor could they have named a player on the team, the coach, or the mascot.

That’s part of the reason people didn’t think the Patriots belonged in the tournament at all. The CAA is what’s called a mid-major conference, which is a nice way of saying it’s more than a notch below real college basketball as exemplified by teams like Duke, UConn, UCLA, Michigan State, Michigan, North Carolina, Kansas and all the other big names from conferences whose names resonate through the ages.

Mid-majors get in the NCAA Tournament by winning their conference tournaments. Then they have the decency to lose in the first or second round to make way for their betters. They’re cannon fodder for the big programs, easy early-round wins for the schools that will soon be fighting for the title.

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But there’s been a leveling of talent in men’s college hoops that’s been going on for some time. Men’s schools get just 12 scholarships a year, a limit imposed in the name of overall gender equity in college athletics. That limit has helped to spread the talent around the nation.

When John Wooden was racking up victories four decades ago, he had a bench that could have finished second in the country. He stockpiled the best players in the country, and some of them never saw the court except at the end of blowouts.

You can’t do that anymore. There are more talented kids coming into the system than ever and there are more places for them to find a home. With every conference having television schedules, there’s also more opportunity for them to be seen.

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And, with 65 teams in the tournament, there’s more opportunities to at least go to the big dance. Until now, though, the extra places in the brackets always went to the big schools, not the also-rans in the mid-majors.

The selection committee, in its seldom-recognized wisdom, has seen that the lesser known schools deserve their own shots at the brackets. This year, it included more mid-majors than ever, and they came through in a big way.

But none has come through more than George Mason, the school that lost twice at the end of its season to Hofstra, was savaged by the media, and now has proved everyone wrong.

They may be unheralded, but they’re no longer unknown. And, with all the favorites gone, Cinderella has never had a better chance to win it all.