Recap the trends in 2014 when both UConn men's and women's teams were in the Final Four. (0:33)
The Huskies men's and women's basketball squads are attempting to both make an appearance in the national title game, the first time that's happened since 2014. The women will take on fellow 1-seed South Carolina on Friday (7 p.m. ET, ESPN) while the men will have to get past Illinois on Saturday.
UConn's men's team had a nervy road to the championship back in 2014, needing overtime to beat 10-seed St. John's in the second round and never winning a game by more than 12 points in their title run, eventually defeating Butler. The women's team, on the other hand, cruised through their tournament, capping a 40-0 season with a 79-58 rout of 2-seed Notre Dame in the title game.
It's a testament to just how good UConn basketball has been that we only have to go back 12 years for the last time both their teams vied for a championship. Still, 12 years in pop culture is an eternity. Here's a look back at what the world was like back in March of UConn's golden year.
First released in November 2013, Pharrell Williams' upbeat single took a bit to reach the top of the charts. It finally did so in March 2014, topping the Billboard Hot 100 and giving Williams his fourth No. 1 single. It ended up being Billboard's top single for the entirety of 2014.
The end of a relationship can be a sad time, but actress Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin can at least take solace in the fact that their divorce popularized a new term. Paltrow's announcement on her "Goop" website used the term "consciously uncouple" to describe the separation, and the term spawned a horde of thinkpieces. It even has its own Wikipedia page.
Matthew McConaughey wasn't always such a huge star. The Texas native was famous, sure, but mainly for lighter appearances in romantic comedies. In the 2010s, however, McConaughey proved he had the chops to carry more dramatic roles. His role in "Dallas Buyers Club" as Ron Woodruff, a man diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980s, won him an Oscar for Best Actor. His co-star, Jared Leto, won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the same movie.
The story of the 300 Spartans (and several thousand other Greek soldiers from other cities, to be entirely historically accurate) and their last stand at the Battle of Thermopylae spawned a graphic novel, "300," which was later made into a hugely popular film. Its sequel, "300: Rise of an Empire," didn't quite reach the heights of the original, but it still grossed $101 million in March 2014, making it the most popular movie in the world for that month.
The sequel to 2011's Dark Souls, Dark Souls II continued the series' combination of moody atmosphere and hair-pulling difficulty. A million gamers on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 had purchased the game a few weeks after its March 2014 release, and the game garnered a score of 91 on Metacritic.
