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It was 16 years before Andre Miller could say he'd watched the broadcast of his biggest college game.

Not that he was ashamed of it, and not that it wasn't important to him. He simply spent his off-time looking forward.

This summer, the 38-year-old finally allowed himself to reminisce. Sifting through his DVDs one day he came across the 1998 NCAA championship, sat down, and pressed play.

Of course, propelled by Miller and Michael Doleac, that year's Utes stunned No. 1 seeds Arizona and North Carolina and took a double-digit lead into the second half against Kentucky before the Wildcats surged to their seventh national title.

Miller still wishes it had ended differently. He'd like to have won. But while rewatching it, he felt not unlucky, he said, but "blessed."

"Just the experience of being able to share with guys from different cultures and backgrounds. We were smart, we worked with each other, and we helped each other out."

Miller is one of six players who will be inducted along with the 1964 Liberty Bowl-winning football team into the Crimson Club Hall of Fame on Friday night.

Since leaving Utah he's played for six NBA teams and racked up 8,153 assists — good for ninth all-time. Most recently, Washington picked up his option after he came off the bench to help the Wizards beat the Bulls in Round One of the Eastern Conference playoffs.

None of that, he feels, would be possible without the U.

Then-head coach Rick Majerus was the first to offer Miller as an academic nonqualifier out of Los Angeles in 1994 — he had failed to meet the NCAA's minimum on standardized tests, despite being an otherwise solid student at Verbum Dei High School.

Believe it or not, while sitting out his first year per NCAA nonqualifier rules, Miller was petrified that Majerus would wind up regretting taking a chance on him.

Even as a redshirt freshman, when he averaged almost 26 minutes per game playing with future No. 2 overall pick Keith Van Horn, he was a bundle of nerves before every game.

"I was kind of thrown out there with the wolves," he said.

And the anxiety never subsided entirely. He quarterbacked the Runnin' Utes to four straight NCAA Tournaments, yet always felt he had something more to prove to Majerus.

"A lot of people nowadays wouldn't be able to take a guy getting on him like he did, and demanding so much," Miller said. "… [But] everything was expected, deserved and needed."

Nobody has demanded as much since, Miller said. He last saw his old coach in Chicago while playing for the Nuggets, a year before he died of heart failure in 2012.

Now Miller has a 14-year-old son learning the game — he's attended Utah basketball camps, incidentally — and the elder Miller tries somewhat to channel Majerus.

"But it's just not possible," he said. "As much as you want to be on your son, you want to give him a little bit of slack. There's only one Rick Majerus."

So indebted was Miller to Majerus and the U. community that he donated $500,000 to his former program in 2006.

To this day, he said, he'll sometimes call Utah's assistants if he sees a kid with some chops. One current player who received his endorsement: true freshman point guard Isaiah Wright.

Miller said he's impressed by the new practice facility currently under construction and the coaching staff under Larry Krystkowiak. The point guard drills conducted by associate head coach Tommy Connor helped push Miller to an elite level in the mid-1990's he said.

But for all Miller's own on-court exploits, it's the other stuff he remembers most fondly from his time in Salt Lake City: dinners with friends and outdoorsy things like fishing, water skiing, jet skiing and horseback riding.

A former high school quarterback, he recalled playing catch at the dorms with fellow 2014 Hall of Fame inductee Kevin Dyson, and Dyson lit up at the memory of playing pickup basketball with Miller at the HPER.

Once, Dyson threw a pass to the rim expecting Miller to lay it in, and he instead threw down a dunk — "I didn't know he could jump," Dyson joked.

Above all, Miller said, his experience at the U. was marked by the sincerity of friends, fans and professors.

"It was a family environment, and that's why I hold the University of Utah dear to me." Andre Miller file

• 6-foot-2, 200 pounds, from Los Angeles.

College • Finished with 721 assists in four seasons, second all-time at Utah behind Jeff Jonas, and 254 steals, first all-time by 63. Played in 15 NCAA Tournament games, named a first-team All-American.

Pros • Selected No. 8 by Cleveland in 1999. Career has included stops with the Clippers, Nuggets (twice), Sixers, Trail Blazers and Wizards.