INDIANAPOLIS — When Hep Cronin, a baseball scout for the Atlanta Braves, would pack up the car for a trip to hunt for prospects, he would sometimes bring his two young boys, Dan and Mick. In the stands, they would ask their father which player he was watching, but he wouldn’t tell them.

“I’d say, ‘No, you pick out the player I’m looking at,’” said Cronin, who discovered a small college outfielder named David Justice and was the first in the organization to sing the praises of a high school infielder whom the Braves would eventually draft first over all, Chipper Jones.

“There’s no sense in coming along if you’re not keeping your eyes open,” Cronin would remind his boys. “They’d get in the car on the way home and one of them would say, ‘We’re looking at the center fielder.’ And the other would say, ‘We’re looking at the right fielder.’”

Those scouting sensibilities that Mick Cronin, 49, developed at an early age have served him well as a basketball coach, not only because he can pick talent, but because it taught him to envision what it might become down the road.

So if others are surprised that his U.C.L.A. Bruins — who lost their best player to injury, dropped their last four regular-season games and barely made the N.C.A.A. tournament — are on the cusp of the Final Four, Cronin and his players are not.

“All I can say is we never stopped believing in ourselves,” said Jaime Jaquez Jr., who scored 17 points and made two critical jumpers in overtime that helped the 11th-seeded Bruins to a 88-78 victory over second-seeded Alabama on Sunday night. “We went into practice, there were some tough practices there where it was probably easier to just get down and try to wrap it in and call it a season. But we stuck together.”

The Bruins, who rallied from a 14-point deficit to beat Michigan State in overtime in a play-in game, had to get off the mat on Sunday, too, after Alex Reese’s long 3-pointer just before the buzzer sent the game into overtime.

Their reward for shaking off that shot and pulling away to win in overtime is a date Tuesday night with top-seeded Michigan, which rolled over Florida State on Sunday.

The notion of U.C.L.A., a program with 11 national championships, as a plucky underdog may be dubious. Blue bloods don’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But it fits the character of Cronin, its second-year coach, who cut his teeth in the game by putting on workouts for Tim Grgurich, the longtime N.B.A. defensive guru, and described himself as “a short Irishman telling you to get in a defensive stance.”

When Cronin arrived in Los Angeles, after a decade at Cincinnati, he wasn’t sure how that message was going to land. “Some people take jobs, and everybody’s running for the hills,” he said.

Whether it was players like Jaquez, who had committed, or holdovers like the wing Jules Bernard, point guard Tyger Campbell, the key reserve David Singleton or the senior Chris Smith, an all-conference guard who sustained a season-ending knee injury on New Year’s Eve, the Bruins were at least willing to hear Cronin’s pitch.

It was straightforward: The work would be taxing, he told his players, but they would experience a great deal of satisfaction in restoring luster to a program that had not advanced past the round of 16 since 2008.

He also told the Bruins, who, for the first time since 1978-79 did not include a McDonald’s all-American on their roster, that he would never view them as somebody else’s recruits.

“If you show up at workouts tomorrow, you’re my player,” Cronin said he told the players when he was hired. “If you don’t want to, I fully understand. We’ll find you a new home. But if you show up tomorrow, I don’t ever want to hear, if we sign a player, that he’s going to play his guy. It’s real clear, guys. I’m here to develop you on and off the court.”

U.C.L.A. has perpetually settled for Plan B (or C or D) in its coaching searches.

Jim Harrick, who won the program’s last national championship, in 1995, was given the job after Jim Valvano and Larry Brown said no. Ben Howland, who took U.C.L.A. to three consecutive Final Fours, was hired after Rick Pitino, Roy Williams and Mike Montgomery could not be lured to Westwood. When Howland left, and Brad Stevens and Shaka Smart could not be sold on the job, the Bruins settled for Steve Alford.

It was no different when Alford was fired at midseason two years ago.

U.C.L.A. pursued John Calipari, and met several times with him, but he said no — a decision made easier by a 10-year, $86 million extension from Kentucky. There were discussions with Texas Christian’s Jamie Dixon and Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, but none that produced a deal. The Bruins chose not to wait to pursue Tony Bennett, who was in the middle of a championship run at Virginia.

After a nearly 100-day search, U.C.L.A. settled on Cronin, who had built a steady winner in Cincinnati, but one that had little N.C.A.A. tournament success.

The hire itself was an interesting experiment. High school stars come to U.C.L.A. for myriad reasons — access to Hollywood, the beach, connections. It’s a pleasant way station for a rising star waiting for the N.B.A. to call. What players rarely come to Westwood for is to play defense. Yet for Cronin, the lure was obvious: Coming to U.C.L.A. would give him the opportunity to recruit elite players.

Cronin picked up Johnny Juzang, who languished on the bench at Kentucky as a freshman last season but has taken several star turns in this year’s tournament. He added a five-star guard, Daishen Nix, only to have him bolt for the G League last summer. And he has signed Peyton Watson, a guard from Long Beach Poly who will be the first McDonald’s all-American that Cronin will coach at U.C.L.A.

These are all players he never would have gotten at Cincinnati.

“If he walked into a gym and saw Izzo, Self and Roy before, he’d have to go to another gym,” said Hep Cronin, referring to Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo, Kansas Coach Bill Self and North Carolina Coach Williams. “You can’t chase a bad hand. The only way you get in the living room of some of these guys is with an underground tunnel. At U.C.L.A., you walk in the front door.”

Last weekend, and now this one, Hep Cronin has been driving to Indianapolis from his home in Cincinnati. It is the first time he has seen his son and his team in person since the start of the pandemic. The way the Bruins have played, with their newfound determination and discipline allowing their skills to shine, they have been his latest prospect worth following.