Athens — For $2 Brandon Lieblich could pretty much guarantee a spot inside Stegeman Coliseum this season.

"You walk up and $2 gets you the best seat in the house over in the student section," the Georgia senior said. "I don't know if it is like that at other schools, but that is how it is here."

Rich Addicks/AJC (ENLARGE)

Georgia fans regained their basketball enthusiasm with four wins in four days.

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At Duke they camp out for days. At other schools, a student might feel like Charlie Bucket if he scored a ticket to the big game.

Georgia, however, is not other schools when it comes to basketball. Make that it wasn't.

The once-moribund program has caught fire and stoked the imaginations of students on campus.

"I couldn't have cared less about basketball until this weekend," senior Kevin Loop said. "[Sunday] I watched on the edge of my seat."

Those were just about the best seats to be had. The student body, which rarely mobilizes for Georgia basketball, had little choice but to sit at home and watch the games on TV. Due to the venue change, tickets were limited. So fans watched from home.

And those first few games were watched with a healthy amount of skepticism.

"When you looked at it, the SEC tournament was just something to get through," said David Koonin, a sophomore at Georgia. "Just lose to Ole Miss and start to get ready for next year, start the coaching search."

The fans were jaded because, as Koonin said, "This really wasn't a team you wanted to root for."

Players had been kicked off. Games had been lost. Enthusiasm, which was never high, had ebbed to new lows.

"I never would have believed this would happen," Lieblich said. "I remember my freshman year, and there were guys in my dorm that walked on. And you are thinking, 'This is Division I basketball, and some guy from my dorm just walked onto the team?' "

Then Georgia went and stomped through the SEC tournament field.

"I had 14 guys and two girls at my house watching the game, and I would say only two of them had been to 75 percent of the games this year," Koonin said.

But they all watched Sunday. They all were fans then.

And now they all want to know what is next.

"We were just talking about going to the game and watching them play against Xavier [in Washington]," Lieblich said. "But I don't know if we can get tickets."

Oh, how times have changed.