March is for the Dreamers

Twenty-seven years is a long time to wait.

The last time Iowa made the Sweet Sixteen, Bill Clinton was in the White House, Rip Hamilton was at UConn, and this Iowa roster wasn't born yet (and neither was I). Last night in Tampa, a ninth-seeded team of transfers, late bloomers, and grinders knocked out the defending national champion Florida Gators — ending that drought the way nobody drew it up. A corner three with four seconds left from a kid nobody recruited out of high school.

That's the story. But to understand why it hit the way it did, you have to know who Alvaro Folgueiras is and where he came from.

He grew up in Malaga, Spain, losing his dad at nine years old. His mother, Beatriz, worked 14-hour days to keep the family afloat, and when Alvaro was 16, she made the decision to send him to America. She packed him up and shipped him across the Atlantic to a prep school in Daytona Beach and trusted that it would work out.

It took years, including a D2 transfer at Robert Morris where he won Horizon League Player of the Year. Then Ben McCollum called, and Folgueiras followed him to Iowa City.

This weekend, Beatriz flew nearly 4,500 miles to Tampa to watch her son play in a college game in person for the first time in two years. She stood courtside holding a handmade sign — "YOU ARE THE BEST #7" — and let fans help her hold it up. Iowa was facing the top seed in the tournament, a Florida team that had beaten Prairie View A&M by 59 points two days earlier. None of that seemed to matter to her.

Sunday night with eight seconds left, Florida made one of two free throws to go up by two. The game looked like it was slipping away the same way these games always seem to. In the timeout before the final Iowa possession, Folgueiras told teammate Bennett Stirtz he was going to make it. Stirtz broke the press, found him in the left corner, and he did.

He pointed to the sky — like he always does, for his dad — and then he found his mother in the crowd. The moment you saw on every highlight was exactly what it looked like: a kid who'd been through a lot, finally getting something he deserved.

"She sent a 16-year-old to America without knowing any English, without anything but dreams and hunger," he said afterward. "March is for the dreamers. There's no better dreamers than us."

The Folgueiras moment is the emotional heart of this run, but the full story is stranger and more interesting than one player. Almost nobody on this roster was supposed to be here.

Ben McCollum spent 15 years at Northwest Missouri State — winning four national championships — before anyone in D1 paid real attention. His teams played slow, scored efficiently, defended, and won. A lot. His all-time winning percentage sits around 82%, which puts him in rarefied historical company, but it took until Drake University in Des Moines gave him a shot to prove it translated.

It certainly translated. Drake went 31-4, won the Missouri Valley, and made the Round of 32 in 2025. Iowa came calling. McCollum, an Iowa City native, went home.

And he brought his guys with him. Six of them followed him from Drake, some of whom had already followed him from Northwest Missouri State before that. Stirtz put a "do not contact" tag on his transfer portal entry and waited. He just knew. Tavion Banks, Kael Combs, Cam Manyawu, Isaia Howard — guys who went from D2 to the Missouri Valley to the Big Ten in three years without blinking.

The outside read on this Iowa team all season was skepticism. Mid-major transfers running a grind-it-out system in a conference that would eventually expose them. Florida, the No. 1 seed and reigning national champions, looked like exactly the kind of team that would do it. Instead, Banks put up 20 on 7-of-10 shooting and Alvaro Folgueiras, a Robert Morris transfer who wasn't on anybody's radar two years ago, hit the shot that sent Iowa to the Sweet Sixteen.

Iowa plays Nebraska on Thursday. That's not a sentence anyone who covered Big Ten basketball in October would have written with confidence. Folgueiras turns 21 on April 1. His mother made the trip from Malaga to Tampa to see him play for the first time in two years, and now she's on her way to Houston.

March is for the dreamers.