Gonzaga-UCLA will be remembered for years. That might be bad news for Gonzaga-Baylor.

Duke’s 104-103 win over Kentucky in overtime, a region final in Philadelphia that just turned 29 on March 28, remains in conversation and in view almost three decades on, its closing shot by Duke’s Christian Laettner still playing in video highlights each year to elicit goose bumps and torment — the latter toward Kentucky fans, those pillars of devotion.

In that bid to stretch similarly across time, Gonzaga vs. UCLA has just gotten going, the minds of participants and witnesses still processing the plot twists, the soaring caliber and the closing 40-foot bank shot by Jalen Suggs, the elegant Gonzaga freshman from West St. Paul, Minn. Already Gonzaga vs. UCLA has proved intoxicating and exhausting enough to dilute a thought that would have figured to dominate thoughts: Gonzaga’s pursuit of the first unbeaten season in the sport since Indiana’s in 1975-76. It would be something else — and something unforeseeable — if it were to affect this next shiny game, given how Gonzaga and Baylor held down the Nos. 1 and 2 spots almost all year with such rare perpetuity that they seemed to surround those rankings with yards and picket fences.

Here comes Gonzaga vs. Baylor at last, one of only nine occasions in the past 43 years in which two top-seeded titans have made it through the ruckus of the brackets to meet in a final, and it could wind up partially eclipsed. It comes precisely four months after the coronavirus cancellation of a Gonzaga vs. Baylor clash set for downtown Indianapolis — back when, as Baylor Coach Scott Drew tells it, the two coaches rode back from their news conference joking it would be better to meet here in early April anyway. They never could have predicted a rematch of their non-match would turn out seeming sort of inconvenient, perhaps rushed.

Can’t they wait another week?

“Yeah, what goes through my mind is we’ve got a short duration here to get ready for just, gosh, a terrific Baylor team,” Mark Few, the 22-season Gonzaga coach, said during the fumes of a storybook Saturday night. Nobody envied him right there.

Baylor had just looked fearsome in annihilating Houston in the first semifinal, leading 45-20 at halftime and winning, 78-59, such that Few said, “I think now they’re back playing the way they were earlier this year,” when Baylor reached 17-0 before the pandemic ransacked its February schedule. Few continued on Baylor: “And so well coached. And just, great plan. And just executing the plan. Stepping up, making shots. Playing great defense. So unfortunately it’s just kind of — that’s how it is.”

That’s how it is, all right, and if you seek clues from how it was, you might look back at the 1992 Final Four, which began seven nights after Duke vs. Kentucky wound its way to the last of its many swishes.

The 1992 Final Four did occur, as the records indicate, and clearly occurred in Minneapolis, but no one except next of kin and other fanatics remembers anything about it other than who won (Duke) and who served as finalist (Michigan and its “Fab Five” freshmen rock stars). It filled with three dreary games and a hundred clunky plays. The players took a combined 342 shots and either missed 192 or made 150, depending on your outlook on life. In a semifinal with Indiana that managed to be both close and dullish, Duke shot 42 free throws, making the event a bonanza for any free throw aficionados out there.

The champion looked like it fended off both opponents and burnout. All told, it felt as if the Duke-Kentucky game had taken whatever ration of theater a tournament might possess and depleted the whole tank.

Could Gonzaga vs. Baylor suffer similarly from Gonzaga vs. UCLA? It will tip off with people still comparing Gonzaga vs. UCLA to Duke vs. Kentucky. Both had gorgeous caliber from teams that looked as if in some curious collaboration to flatter the sport. Both had everybody shooting better than 50 percent (Duke 65.4, Kentucky 56.9, Gonzaga 58.7, UCLA 57.6). Both had teams combine to make precisely 71 field goals. Both had overtimes full of art (nine scores on 14 possessions in Duke-Kentucky, nine on 15 in Gonzaga-UCLA). Both had famously nutty bank shots (Sean Woods to give Kentucky a 103-102 lead with 2.1 seconds left, Suggs to win for Gonzaga).

Both set minds into helpless states of reliving.

It’s hard to play a final with three teams in it, and UCLA will remain uncommonly present for somebody who departed for Los Angeles. You still might hear UCLA Coach Mick Cronin saying: “We might not have been the best team in the country all year, but we became one of the best four teams in the country, period. This was not a fluke tonight. We would not have gotten blown out Monday night. We didn’t sneak in. You know how good Michigan and Alabama are,” meaning its two, gaudy, previous victims.

You still might hear Johnny Juzang, UCLA’s revelation of a star with 28 points against Michigan and 29 against Gonzaga, saying: “But really what I realized walking off the court was just how incredible this group was and just the brotherhood and camaraderie and cohesion and just everything about this group, man, the heart. That’s really it. The heart of this group, man. I was just so proud to have made this run with these guys.”

You might think about how Gonzaga never got challenged until Saturday night, with 29 of its first 30 wins by double digits, and then think again of Suggs sharing the crucial truth: “That team [UCLA] is special. But I don’t think we lost our identity all night.”

That’s true, and so they will try to hold on to their identity through their hangover, and then when it’s done, the Gonzaga coach who has been to an unbroken 21 tournaments and two of the past four championship games will go home and resume his outdoorsman bent. Said Few: “I always tell everybody at the end of the year when I’m standing in a river all by myself somewhere in Montana or Idaho, Alaska, somewhere, then you kind of start laughing by yourself to where we were in ’89, ’90, to where we are now, it’s unbelievable. And atmospheres and events like this. But unfortunately, no time for that right now. We’ve got to get ready for a terrific Baylor team. And we’re going to have to play great.”

That might be hard.