When Kevin Willard finally broke through Sunday, making the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet 16 as a head coach for the first time, the asterisk was on his mind.

That’s the asterisk of 2020, when his Seton Hall basketball team was in line for a No. 3 or No. 4 seed in the Big Dance, with the first two games slated for nearby Albany, before the Covid pandemic scuttled March Madness and everything else.

So after Maryland rallied past Colorado State on a Round of 32 buzzer-beater – thanks to a perfectly drawn play out of a timeout – Willard referenced his prior job when a reporter asked him about the breakthrough.

“I wish my first (second) weekend would have been at Seton Hall, to be honest with you,” Willard replied. “Seton Hall was really good to me, and I thought we had some chances.”

In addition to 2020, the other golden opportunity came in 2018, when his senior-driven Pirates gave top-seeded Kansas all it could handle in the second round before falling in Wichita.

After 12 years of building Seton Hall into a March Madness regular, Willard left South Orange with a 1-5 Dance record and an empty feeling about what might have been had his best edition gotten a chance.

“I know it's always been on my back and it's always been a stigma, but I knew I had confidence in myself that eventually if you keep getting to this tournament, which my teams keep getting to this tournament, that I was eventually going to knock the door down,” Willard said Sunday. “I wish I would have done it at Seton Hall, to be honest with you, first. It's a place I loved and still love, and they were so good to me. I wish I would have been able to do it there. But...this is only our second Sweet 16 in 23 years here, so I'm just as happy that it happened at Maryland.”

The Terps got there thanks to a variation of a play Willard honed at the Hall. With 3.7 seconds left, Maryland inbounded to star center Derik Queen, who drove down the left side of the lane and banked in the game-winner (he did take an extra step on the way, though the "gather step," which is allowed in the NBA, is increasingly tolerated in the college game). Willard likened the sequence to former Seton Hall standout Isaiah Whitehead’s game-winning shot in the 2016 Big East Tournament final, though that came with 20 seconds left, Whitehead drove the right side, and the ball wasn’t inbounded directly to him.

It also was reminiscent of Seton Hall’s dramatic 2020 victory at home over Butler, which ended with Quincy McKnight lobbing a baseline inbounds pass to Sandro Mamukelashvili, who rolled the ball around the rim and in for the win at the buzzer.

The details differed but the principal was the same: Get the rock to your biggest mismatch going to the tin.

As a result, fourth-seeded Maryland is headed to the West Regional semifinals against top-seeded Florida (Thursday, 7:39 p.m.). And Willard, a good coach long dogged by that asterisk, has a weight lifted.

Jerry Carino has covered the New Jersey sports scene since 1996 and the college basketball beat since 2003. Contact him at .