From 1995 through the 2012 season, the Michigan Wolverines' basketball program made zero Sweet Sixteen appearances. With last night's thrilling 86-78 win over LSU, the Maize and Blue have now made four consecutive Sweet Sixteens, dating back to 2017.

Michigan is in the midst of a stretch that only one other program in the sport can match — Gonzaga. The Wolverines and Bulldogs are the only two schools (out of 353 Division 1 programs in the sport) who have been a participant in each of the last four Sweet Sixteens (counting this year's), a feat the game's blue bloods like Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and UCLA can't even lay claim to.

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U-M's sustained run of postseason excellence takes on even more significance when digging a little deeper and putting in perspective how difficult it is for any program to make four straight Sweet Sixteens.

This is the first time in Michigan history the Wolverines have accomplished the feat. In fact, there had only been two previous occurrences where the program had even made three consecutive trips to the Sweet Sixteen — from 1964 to 1966 under Dave Strack and from 1992 to 1994 under Steve Fisher.

It's worth mentioning the first 12 years of the NCAA Tournament (1939 through 1950) only featured eight teams and didn't expand to 16 until 1951. With that in mind, schools have had the opportunity to make what can be considered the Sweet Sixteen every year since 1951, and yet some of the most storied programs in the nation have never been to four straight.

Programs rich in tradition with at least one national title under their belt such as Villanova (three titles — 1985, 2016 and 2018), Syracuse (2003), Georgetown (1984) and Arizona (1997) have never been to four straight Sweet Sixteens.

Fellow Big Ten programs in Purdue and Illinois who have played in national championship games (the Boilermakers made it in 1969 and the Fighting Illini in 2005) have never appeared in four consecutive Sweet Sixteens either.

A few of the game's blue bloods have pulled off the feat before, but several of them haven't done so in decades.