Patrick Mulrenin

One shining moment

This is the season of buzzer beaters, unsung heroes and a Luther Vandross-backed montage after the championship game.

As this year's NCAA tournament winds down to Monday night's finale between Kansas and Memphis, Bucks.com caught up with three current Milwaukee Bucks who each played in NCAA championships and walked off the court as the victors. While each player will forever be considered an NCAA champion, the path that Jake Voskuhl, Charlie Bell and Charlie Villanueva took to get there differed.

"Watching the tournament all those years as a little kid and then playing in it and winning it, it's so cool," Villanueva told Truman Reed. "The environment and atmosphere was just so crazy. That championship ring is something I'm going to carry with me for the rest of my life."

Voskuhl helped the University of Connecticut topple a favored Duke team in 1999. Bell won it all the next year with a Michigan State team that dropped Florida, 89-76, in the title game. Villanueva got his ring as a freshman in 2004 when his UConn Huskies ended the season by defeating Georgia Tech for the championship.

"Going out on top is like no other,” Bell said. “You're riding a high. It lasted for a long time. When you get back to school and you're on campus, everybody's yelling, 'Hey!!!' Then I walked into a lecture hall, and everybody was waiting on me to come in so they could give me a standing ovation. We had a parade after that, and a big gathering at Spartan (football) Stadium. That parade went all the way from downtown Lansing to East Lansing. We were in the back of Hummers, and the streets were just full of people. It was unbelievable."