They have at times referred to themselves as "The Forgotten Team," which is an exaggeration, but you can understand their point.
So much hype was placed on the Fab Five era at Michigan that began in 1991, it's easy to forget the Wolverines actually won a national championship three seasons before Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson became the talk of college basketball.
Terry Mills, a member of the 1989 title team, once said when asked if he was part of the Fab Five, "No, we were the team that won it."
The Fab Five got a lot of publicity, reached the Final Four twice, but never finished the job like their predecessors.
It's been 24 years now since Glen Rice and Rumeal Robinson led Michigan to an 80-79 victory over Seton Hall in overtime at the Kingdome in Seattle.
The Wolverines could have won their first title since then Monday night in Atlanta but lost the championship game to Louisville, 82-76.
Although this year's tournament run was somewhat of a surprise for Michigan, the road to that 1989 crown was a stunner under the circumstances.
That team had to overcome the adversity of losing its coach on the eve of the tournament.
Bill Frieder had been spotted boarding a late-night flight to Arizona three days before the Wolverines' first-round game. It was all unbeknownst to his athletic director, Bo Schembechler, the legendary football coach.
The next day, Frieder announced he would be leaving Michigan after the tournament to become Arizona State's coach.
Schembechler, however, accelerated the departure by firing Frieder and proclaiming, "A Michigan man is going to coach a Michigan team."
Frieder's top assistant, Steve Fisher, was named the interim coach and told jokingly by a co-worker that all he had to do to keep the job was to win six straight games.
Darned if Fisher, now coaching at San Diego State, didn't do just that.
The Wolverines rolled into the Final Four with victories over Xavier, South Alabama, North Carolina and Virginia.
Rice, who went on to a 15-year NBA career, was the catalyst by scoring an NCAA tournament-record 184 points in the six victories, an average of 30.7 per game. He simply got into a zone and couldn't be stopped.
The controversy over the coaching situation followed the Wolverines every step of the way.
When it appeared the Wolverines might lose in the national semifinal to Illinois, reporters moved into position in the Michigan cheering section to try to get a response from Schembechler concerning Fisher's future.
But those questions were put on hold when Sean Higgins got a rebound and scored with two seconds remaining to give the Wolverines an 83-81 victory to advance to the final game.
Michigan went down to the wire again against Seton Hall, needing two free throws by Robinson with three seconds left in OT to escape with the one-point victory.
Robinson, who is currently serving a prison sentence for bank bribery and wire fraud, wasn't a good free-throw shooter, but he made the two biggest of his life and then raised his right arm high to celebrate before cutting down the nets.
If the Wolverines had lost that night, Schembechler quite likely would have hired someone else as the new coach. There were rumors that Pete Guillen, then at Xavier, might be the target.
But Schembechler had no choice anymore, not after they'd won it all. The external pressure to bring back Fisher was too overwhelming, even for someone as strong as Schembechler, who had previously indicated he wanted to take the program in a different direction after Frieder's dismissal.
The team arrived back in Ann Arbor to a celebration at Crisler Arena with fans holding up signs that read "Fisher: 6-0" while chanting Fisher's name.
James Duderstadt, the university president, told Schembechler that he could hire whomever he wanted but to give Duderstadt "48 hours to get out of town" if it wasn't going to be Fisher.
In an odd way, that magical six-game run arguably changed the course of Michigan basketball's future, largely for the worse.
If not for the national title, there's probably no Fisher returning as coach, probably no Fab Five and no ensuing scandal that led to Fisher's firing in 1997 and rocked the program for many years.
