INDIANAPOLIS — It was the best $34 David Mirkovic ever spent on Amazon. Shortly after Illinois touched down in Houston last week for the NCAA Tournament‘s South Regional, teammate Keaton Wagler shared a social media post with Mirkovic.

In it, a local television anchor wrote that if the Illini’s Montenegrin sensation showed up to a media availability wearing a cowboy hat, the anchor would buy his jersey and frame it on his living room wall. It took Mirkovic about two seconds to decide and three clicks to order a cowboy hat to be delivered to the team hotel.

After Illinois punched a ticket to its first Final Four in 21 years, Mirkovic sat at his locker in Houston addressing the media while wearing the hat.

“Why not? We in Texas,” he said with a Mirk smirk.

“Mirk is 19,” assistant coach Orlando Antigua said, “but he’s really 8.”

A CELEBRATION WITH WATER GUNS AND NETS

In the moments before that, Mirkovic had been perched atop his locker with a pump-action water gun trained on his head coach, who’d just burst through the door with his own Super Soaker howling, “We’re going to the Final Four!”

Before that liquid shootout, Mirkovic had nearly wrecked the longstanding tradition of cutting down the nets after a regional final. When it was his turn, he took one step up the ladder, grabbed the bottom of a still very attached net, and tried to rip it down with both hands.

Teammate Kylan Boswell stepped in to stop him.

“Holy s—, bro! What the f— is wrong with you?” Boswell yelped.

Then Mirkovic grabbed the ladder and shook it playfully — while Boswell stood atop it with scissors.

“The first time I saw him,” teammate Tomislav Ivisic said of Mirkovic, “he looked fat, he looked stupid. We started practicing and I saw he had great potential.

“He plays hard every time. When I met him more, I realized he’s actually funny. He’s still stupid, (but) maybe a little more mature. Maybe.”

It’s always like this around these guys.

THE FUNNIEST TEAM IN INDIANAPOLIS

There is not a funnier or more fun-loving team at the 2026 Final Four. Their size, skill and shooting have carried the Illini here, via the most efficient offense in the modern era of college basketball and a surging defensive intensity in this tournament, but so has their obvious chemistry and outsized personality. Thanks to this deep run, the entire country is getting a chance to fall in love with them now.

“Having fun along the way is what this is all about,” coach Brad Underwood said. “You gotta enjoy the moment. You gotta play basketball with the idea that it’s fun, that it’s not a grind, and this team is very loose that way.”

THE BALKAN BLOC

Driven by Mirkovic and the rest of Underwood’s Balkan Bloc — there are six players of Eastern European descent on the roster — Illinois has become must-see TV after the games end.

They curse freely, in multiple languages, crack jokes about each other’s physiques and extol the virtues of finding a good Croatian woman to marry.

“More of the world gets an opportunity to see how we are — and it looks like they like it,” Ivisic said.