Emeka Okafor and the Huskies will face the Duke-Xavier winner in the Final Four. AP

PHOENIX -- It's hard to get a bunch of kids to play their best just when you need them to play their best. So many things can go wrong. Injuries. Fatigue. Luck. Sometimes, it's impossible to hold everything together for an entire season. The season's just too long. And sometimes, there's just no explaining why Team A flourishes while Team B fades into oblivion.

Timing is what it is. Timing may not be everything in college basketball, but in March, it's the most important thing. There are lots of great basketball teams that have come into this month as lions only to leave as lambs.

But then you get those other teams. Good teams. Solid teams. Teams that maybe did some stumbling, but nothing fatal. They're not the top seeds. They're maybe not seen as great teams.

Until, that is, March rolls around.

Everybody knows that the University of Connecticut has a good team. The Huskies, you know, have the best defense in the nation. They have the best defensive player. They have some pretty good shooters, too.

But they lost twice in February, to Notre Dame and Pittsburgh. They lost their last regular season game at Syracuse. They fell to No. 9 in the polls at one point. For a team that was the preseason No. 1, the Huskies were a huge disappointment to a lot of people.

But then they won the Big East Tournament and earned a No. 2 seed in the tournament.

Then, everything started to click.

The Huskies are headed to the Final Four now as maybe the hottest team in the tournament. They score anywhere, any how. Their guards are marvelous. They just keep sending out big man after big man. They shut down everyone. The Huskies chewed up the Phoenix Region, winning by an average of almost 18 points a game. Nobody had a chance against them.

This is their time. UConn is playing the best it's played all year. Right now. When it counts the most.

"I think, right now, we're finally playing up to our abilities, like people were expecting from us all season," said Taliek Brown, UConn's senior point guard. "We're playing solid defense. Our offense is coming like this [here, he snapped his fingers], in quick bunches. We've been working hard. Now, we can see it all in front of us."

The Huskies are playing so well right now that it has to scare the air out of any team dreaming about San Antonio. Thursday, in their game against Vanderbilt, the Huskies had a sloppy stretch in the second half (eight turnovers in a little more than seven minutes) that would have buried lesser teams. The Huskies regrouped and won by 20 points.

Saturday against Alabama, a team that already had beaten No. 1 Stanford and defending national champions Syracuse (the last team to beat UConn), the Huskies eliminated the turnover problem. They had seven. They had only two in a first half that was practically flawless.

"Honestly," said Josh Boone, one of the 200 big men the Huskies have on their roster, "that may have been our best half we've had all year."

Alabama foolishly decided to challenge UConn and big man Emeka Okafor inside in the first half and he blocked at least five shots. So the Crimson Tide went to work outside, and the UConn guards shut them down (the Alabama starting backcourt was 3-for-13 in the game -- just 1-for-9 in the first half).

Meanwhile, UConn swingman Rashad Anderson was dropping all six of his 3-point tries in the first half. The Huskies led 53-29 at the break. It was never a contest.

Maybe most telling, though, is that the Huskies kept Alabama from making any kind of a meaningful comeback in the second half. Even with a huge lead, even getting out of their own offense by patiently playing the clock, even with Okafor on the bench with an injury, they did not let up. The Tide whittled the lead down to 14 points at one point in the second half. But it might as well have been 140.

"We became a terrific basketball team," UConn coach Jim Calhoun said. "We have had some times when the expectations weighed heavily upon us. As the season wore down, we saw our window of opportunity start to become more limited. The greatest thing we did was we kicked the window out and we made the opportunity for ourselves."

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The Huskies are past the point of self-doubt now. Their huge defense, with Okafor patrolling the middle -- the Huskies have three other players at 6-foot-10 or bigger -- is the key. Outside, they have the senior Brown, who shut down Alabama's dangerous Antoine Pettway on Saturday, and they have a hot hand from junior Ben Gordon (36 points against Alabama in earning regional MVP honors). Either Brown or Gordon can handle the ball without breaking a sweat.

There is nothing the Huskies can't do. They block shots. They defend on the perimeter. They rebound. They play half-court. They run with the ball. The question, as it is with all good teams, has always been the timing.

Can they do all of that when it counts?

"They made a believer out of me," Alabama coach Mark Gottfried said. "They have so many different weapons to defend that can attack you. Every team you play at this point is pretty good. But they are really good."

There will not be a deeper team in San Antonio than the Huskies. There will not be a better defensive team. There probably won't be a hotter team. It's hard to imagine one with more confidence.

The Huskies strut into the Final Four playing at their absolute peak. And if they're not peaking now ... well, heaven help the team that plays them when they do.

John Donovan is a senior writer for SI.com.