NCAA Championship 2014
UConn and Kentucky will meet Monday night in the 2014 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship from AT&T Stadium in Texas. Getty Images

Set to complete what has certainly been a highly entertaining postseason, the Connecticut Huskies and Kentucky Wildcats are making their final preparations before meeting Monday night in the 2014 NCAA Men's Basketball championship. Winners of the 2011 and 2012 National title games respectively, UConn and Kentucky now hope to repeat the feats that saw them return trophies to their highly decorated universities, trophies that did not seem likely when each team received seeding for the 2014 tournament. Despite tremendous guard play from Shabazz Napier and Ryan Boatright, UConn was placed as the No. 7 seed in the East Region while the Wildcats were tabbed as the Midwest Region's No. 8 seed.

Completely ignoring the number next to their school names, both Connecticut and Kentucky took down big time programs on their way to the season finale. UConn and second-year head coach Kevin Ollie upended No. 10 St. Joseph's, No. 2 Villanova, No. 3 Iowa State, No. 4 Michigan State and top-seeded Florida to reach the championship tilt while John Calipari's squad ended the season's of No. 9 Kansas State, No. 1 and previously undefeated Wichita State, defending champion and No. 4 Louisville, 2013 National runner-up Michigan and No. 2 Wisconsin to land a spot in the title game. Now ready for the highest-seeded championship match-up since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, Calipari and company are anxious to put the finishing touches on their impressive run.

“Well, we got here through an absolute mine field and happened to not step on a mine,” Calipari said this week. “I don't even know what to call it what we just went through. Now my whole mission is to make sure we're not satisfied. That this team is still striving, and like we're talking about, I think all our teams are still getting better. It's crazy, but when I look at the teams, they are. I think we got here by coming together. By absolutely accepting that if we don't do this together, we're all going down. They started leaning on each other a little bit more and counting on each other a little bit more.”

While the Wildcats will enter Monday night's title game from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas with confidence, Shabazz Napier and Connecticut understand that even though their run to the title has been outstanding, the upcoming game will determine how strong their 2013-2014 campaign truly was.

“We all play the game of basketball to compete against the best," Napier said. "This is one of them games. They worked hard to get to this point and we did too. We're going to do our best to get this `W.'

Connecticut vs. Kentucky: DATE, TIME & VIEWING INFO

DATE: Monday, April 7

TIME: 9:10pm, ET

TV COVERAGE: CBS

LIVE STREAM: CLICK HERE

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