Mike Boynton insists the chaos has passed. "Things are normalizing now," the first-year Michigan coach told ESPN in October. "You just focus on preparing your team and trying to coach the games." Normal is relative: his tenure begins in earnest on Friday in Boston, where the Wolverines face No. 4 UConn at TD Garden in a rematch of April's national championship game, a spotlight that should feel tame compared with his summer.

Michigan beat UConn on April 6 to secure its first national title since 1989, and the transfer portal opened 40 minutes later. Within three weeks, lottery picks Aday Mara and Morez Johnson Jr. declared for the NBA draft, replaced by transfer bigs J.P. Estrella, Moustapha Thiam and Jalen Reed. The retooled roster looked capable of repeating. Then, on the morning of June 22, coach Dusty May left for the Dallas Mavericks.

Boynton, May's top assistant, woke up expecting to work a session of May's summer camp; shortly after 10 a.m., he was interim head coach of the reigning champions. He had been promoted the same way at Oklahoma State in 2017 after Brad Underwood left for Illinois, but that came in March, with a full offseason and no portal. "From June 22 to Aug. 1, I was just trying to survive 24 hours at a time," Boynton said.

NCAA rules gave Michigan's players 31 days after his appointment to enter the portal, and quality replacements that late barely existed. "You got 15 guys on June 23 that are free agents," Boynton said. He kept assistants Akeem Miskdeen, Kyle Church and KT Harrell, added Brown head coach Mike Martin and Osceola Magic head coach Dylan Murphy, and zeroed in on point guard Elliot Cadeau, a 40-game starter and the Final Four's Most Outstanding Player, and Trey McKenney, who averaged 9.9 points as one of the nation's best sixth men.

McKenney recommitted soon after Boynton was elevated, and Cadeau followed two days later. "As soon as we made the decision, we texted the group chat and said, 'We want everybody to stay. Everybody stay,'" Cadeau said. Thiam, a top-10 transfer from Cincinnati, recommitted June 30, Estrella followed days later, and five-star freshman Brandon McCoy Jr. stayed July 4. Backup guard L.J. Cason was the only player who left.

Boynton nearly left, too, weighing a move to Dallas with May, and the chance to coach Kyrie Irving and 2026 Rookie of the Year Cooper Flagg, before deciding he might never get another shot at a job like Michigan. On July 10 he accepted a two-year contract whose terms, made public a week later, guarantee a second season only if he hits two of four benchmarks: at least 24 regular-season wins, a top-four Big Ten finish, a Big Ten tournament title or a Sweet 16 appearance. He has shrugged off the hot-seat talk, noting every coach is one three-game skid from the same conversation.

Inside the program, players reject the defending champion label. "It's a different team; it's a different staff," Estrella said. There are also unanswered questions: McCoy, the projected fifth starter, tore his right ACL in late August on the team's European tour, and while Roddy Gayle Jr. started the opener against Oakland, he and Columbia transfer Kenny Noland Jr. are eligible only through preliminary injunctions in New York and Indiana, with no guarantee either fifth-year senior is cleared for the full season.

Michigan is No. 16 in the preseason AP poll despite losing the three best players from the title team, and the schedule befits a contender: after UConn, the Wolverines visit Villanova on Nov. 21, play the Players Era event in Las Vegas on Nov. 24 and face Louisville in Detroit on Dec. 5. The Final Four returns to Detroit in April, a 45-minute drive from Ann Arbor.

"If we don't win, nobody will remember this team," Cadeau said. For him, the rebuild and the coaching change have not dimmed what happened on the night of April 6. "It was the best six months of my life."