For the first time in over 30 years, the Michigan Wolverines are your Men's NCAA Tournament Champions.

The Wolverines, guided by second-year Head Coach Dusty May got it done on Monday night in a slugfest against the UConn Huskies.

Both teams played far from their best, but the Wolverines prevailed in a 69-63 final.

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INDIANAPOLIS -- Before Michigan took the floor to face Gonzaga in the title game of the Players Era Championship in November, Wolverines guard Elliot Cadeau made a comment to his teammates.

"We're the best team ever assembled," Cadeau said at the time.

Michigan then beat Gonzaga by 40 points.

From that point on, the Wolverines were the most dominant team in the country, and they ended Monday the same way they looked on Thanksgiving Eve: as the best team in college basketball.

Michigan put an exclamation point on a historic season in Monday's national championship game, defeating UConn 69-63. Cadeau was named Most Outstanding Player after finishing with 19 points.

The Wolverines won the program's first national championship since 1989 -- and became the first team to beat UConn in the Sweet 16 or later since Michigan State beat the Huskies in the 2009 Final Four.

"When you bring a group this talented together, and they decide from the beginning that they're going to do it this way and they never waver and they never change, that's probably the most uncommon thing in athletics now," Michigan coach Dusty May said. "For these guys to cut down the nets after all they've sacrificed is pretty special."

Michigan wasn't as dominant as it had been early in the NCAA tournament, when it became the first team to score 90 or more points in five straight games in a single tournament. But the Wolverines' strengths all season -- size, length and more size -- were the difference-makers again Monday night.

"They're legit," UConn coach Dan Hurley said. "They definitely deserved to win the national championship. They're clearly the best team in the country this year. They're just so hard to score against at the rim. I could talk about the 3s that we missed, and I thought we had a lot of good 3s that we missed. But they just made it so tough on us around the rim.

It's fitting that the Wolverines were forced to trust their identity in the national championship game. At no point in the season did Michigan's confidence in its ceiling waver. It came close -- once. Just a few days before Michigan put the nation on notice with its performance in Vegas and the "best team ever assembled" remark went public, May and his staff thought about going back to the drawing board.

Something wasn't working. An overtime win over Wake Forest, a close win at TCU. The Wolverines weren't looking like a Final Four team.

May and his assistant coaches spent time trying to figure out whether they should change their lineup, whether the jumbo frontcourt wasn't going to work.

"I remember the day like it was yesterday. We were in the conference room, and we did a deep dive in everything that you could come up with to try to predict whether we thought it would work," May said after Monday's win. "Once we left that meeting, we were more committed than ever that this is going to work."

Staying the course has been a theme for Michigan all season.

The Wolverines' loss to Purdue in the Big Ten championship game was the most vulnerable the Wolverines looked all season. The eight-point defeat was the largest margin of their three losses, and the game was out of reach for most of the second half. It wasn't an ideal way for what had been the nation's most dominant team since November to enter the NCAA tournament.

In May's eyes, however, it was just a wakeup call -- nothing more. It was not a reason to forget the first four months of the season and try something new.

"There weren't any wholesale changes," the Michigan coach said over the weekend. "There wasn't any faith, family and the Michigan Wolverines speech. It was just, 'Let's get back to doing what we know are the right things.'"

Fast-forward to Monday's halftime buzzer, and Will Tschetter gathered his teammates around him in a huddle. It wasn't unique; May's teams have done it since he was at Florida Atlantic. But this one had a little bit of an edge to it. Tschetter got into his teammates, reminding them what was at stake.

"I was just telling them what everyone needed to hear," Tschetter told ESPN. "Everyone was thinking it. We needed to stick together, play our brand of basketball."

"We didn't play our best basketball, and our best basketball was ahead of us," Burnett recalled Tschetter saying. "And we're up four for a national championship. So, lay it all out there on the line and leave no regrets."

That Thanksgiving Eve win over Gonzaga -- and the subsequent proclamations of greatness from Lendeborg -- put a target on Michigan's back all season. But Monday night, the Wolverines proved they were right.

"This," Burnett told ESPN, "is the ultimate target."

Source: ESPN.com