INDIANAPOLIS — The last time Illinois reached the Final Four, in 2005, the Illini’s best-known fan showed up to the national semifinals looking dapper. Bill Murray, an ardent Chicago and Illinois sports enthusiast, longtime bon vivant, a man of many talents and many roles, had that going for him.

Which was nice.

He donned a rumpled but refined plaid sport coat over a pale orange vest and a brighter orange — Illinois orange — tie, replete with an orange Champaign Country Club hat. The Illini won that night but lost in the championship game against North Carolina, and 21 years later he still “feels like there were phantom (foul) calls against James Augustine,” Luke Murray said with a laugh.

Luke is the second-oldest of Bill Murray’s six sons. He’s also an assistant coach at Connecticut, which means he’s the reason why his father, for once, will not be cheering on Illinois on Saturday night when it plays in the national semifinals. Indeed, the Illini’s opponent at Lucas Oil Stadium has made things a bit complicated for Bill Murray, though he’s clear about his loyalties.

“Go Huskies!” Murray wrote in a text message to a Chicago Tribune reporter earlier this week. And if his son’s UConn team advances to the national championship game Monday night, it will do so at the expense of the father’s Illini. Bill Murray, for one, is accustomed to complex if not disappointing sporting dynamics. He is a lifelong Cubs fan, after all.

But this is a new one. What must it be like for him, seeing his longtime favorite college basketball team advance through the NCAA Tournament and all the way to Indianapolis, and the sport’s grandest stage, only to meet his other favorite college basketball team? The one for which his son just so happens to be an assistant coach?

It can’t be easy. Even so, Bill Murray, who has been an animated UConn supporter throughout his son’s tenure there, and throughout another deep Huskies tournament run, declined to elaborate on his emotions regarding the serendipitous Final Four meeting between Illinois and Connecticut. He turned down an interview request in a quintessentially deadpan Murray way:

“I only get tickets if I keep my mouth shut,” he wrote in a text.

It makes some sense, given that Murray has attempted to keep a low profile throughout this latest UConn run. Or, at least as low of a profile as Bill Murray can keep. The television cameras have caught him, nonetheless, throughout the NCAA Tournament, cheering on the Huskies from the good seats, with a close view of the basketball and his son’s work from the UConn bench.

Whenever this Connecticut run ends, either against Illinois on Saturday or in the championship Monday, Luke Murray, 41, will begin his new job as Boston College’s head coach. His father, then, will have to adopt a new team.

Luke Murray has a little less hair than his dad, but the same eyes, and he met the familiar questions about his father with only a bit of exasperation Thursday inside the Connecticut locker room.

But, he said, with a wry smile, “I’ll play along.”

The answers to the most obvious questions:

“What About Bob?” is Luke Murray’s favorite Bill Murray film.

“It’s a funny movie,” he said.

And no, his dad never encouraged him to follow him into comedy, or acting.

“I don’t have the requisite skill set,” he said, “and it was not encouraged. So that never really came up. … I think he wanted us all to do our own thing, you know?”

For almost 20 years, Luke’s thing has been coaching. He spent some time as a graduate assistant at Arizona early in his career and gradually rose through the profession, with stops at Wagner and Towson and Rhode Island before breaking through at Xavier, and then Louisville, before Dan Hurley hired him to join his staff at Connecticut in 2021.

In the five years since, Bill Murray, 75, has become something like an unofficial Huskies mascot. He’s not exactly the team dad, but he’s around, and players who were not yet born or alive for some of his best-known movies have found themselves learning about 1980s and ’90s comedy classics. At least some of them have, that is.

“Ghostbusters,” after all, came out a long time ago. “Caddyshack” is even older.

And “Groundhog Day”? Well, that can describe the Huskies’ recent run of dominance in college basketball only because the movie entered into the cultural zeitgeist after its release in 1993. But still, forgive some of these young college basketball players if they don’t know much about their assistant coach’s father’s work, or some of his most famous roles.

“I’ll be honest,” Malachi Smith, a Connecticut senior guard, said Thursday. “I did not know who he was, in the most respectful way. My teammates did (and) knew he was a famous actor. I told my parents about it.

“They said, ‘Yeah, he’s a phenomenal actor. So funny.’ ”

It was a challenge, in this world of Instagram and TikTok, for Connecticut players to name some Bill Murray movies during their open locker room session on Thursday. Some of them said they knew who Murray was even before arriving at UConn and getting to know his son, yet it was a struggle for those same players to list even a bit of the filmography.

“People always refer to him in ‘Ghostbusters’ or ‘Space Jam,' " said Alec Millender, a Huskies guard, “but I don’t remember him in ‘Ghostbusters’ or ‘Space Jam.’ I don’t know where I remember him from. But I know Bill Murray.”

And Bill Murray, it turns out, knows basketball.

He might not be the X’s and O’s savant that Luke is, “but he definitely watches every game,” Luke Murray said. “And he makes his opinions known.”

“I mean, he has a lot of theories on what we should be doing, how we should be doing it. On court, off court, icebreaking exercises. He’s got a lot of things that he sort of throws at me to consider. It’s always cool. He’s got a unique perspective on things.”

He’s hardly forgotten details of the Illini’s run of 21 years ago, too. Luke said his dad still talks about Illinois’ comeback in 2005 against Arizona in the Elite Eight in a game that happened to be in Chicago. Bill Murray was there, watching the Illini erase a 15-point deficit in the final minutes before prevailing in overtime.

During that memorable March run, Murray became close with the team. He did 30 minutes of standup at the team hotel during the Illini’s stay in Chicago. Dee Brown, who remains one of the most revered players in school history, requested some material from “Caddyshack,” according to a 2005 Tribune story, and so Murray delivered 10 minutes of Carl Spackler.

The players may or may not have achieved total consciousness.

Either way, the Illini were off to St. Louis and the Final Four not long after, with Bill Murray following along. He wore his orange best and posed for pictures that people snapped with flip phones.

Twenty-one years later, Bill Murray will be back at the Final Four and, in a way, he really can’t lose on Saturday night. Either his longtime favorite team will win, or his son.

So he has that going for him. Which is nice, indeed.

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