Team X starts five upperclassmen, plays tight defense and can bury its opponents with threes. Team Y has just four upperclassmen on its entire roster, a sophomore point guard fond of passing like Ricky Rubio and a pair of forwards fond of dunking like Shawn Kemp. The two teams meet tonight in the last game of the Sweet Sixteen and it’s no surprise who most of the country is rooting for.

The surprise is the role reversal. The latter team is 15-seed Florida Gulf Coast, the lowest-seeded NCAA Tournament team to advance this far. The former is Florida, looking for its third consecutive trip to the Elite Eight.

By and large, underdogs in March look and play like the Gators. Their backcourt is small but they make up for it with organized perimeter passing, extensive screening and attentive defense. Florida is by no standards an underdog here; the Gators looked dominant in spurts during the regular season, winning their first seven conference games by an average close to 25 points. They have physically imposing players, too, like Patric Young, Casey Prather and sometimes Erik Murphy. But they are significantly less intimidating in the paint than they are outside of it.

Florida Gulf Coast handled Miami by double digits early in the season and has only lost to one team from Florida all year (at Stetson, a loss it avenged in the Atlantic Sun Tournament). The Eagles soundly beat a team with a number two seed and a potential NBA Draft lottery pick. They dunk often. So often that Ft. Myers is convinced it is now “Dunk City” (This story falls nicely in line with what Florida Man has been up to lately).

If you stripped away all knowledge of these teams prior to the first (or technically second) round of the tournament, including seeding and program history, Florida might look like the underdog.

Five weeks ago I wrote about the possibility that Florida was the best college basketball state in the country. I never would have expected the deciding game for best team in the state to happen the day after Miami bricked its way out of Washington.

The Gators and Eagles will play for a de facto state title tonight. It’s a fitting climax to one of the most strangely triumphant stretches of basketball that the Sunshine State has ever seen.