Feels like deja vu for Fab Florida Five

ATLANTA -- One year, 35 games and a maddening March later, there was progress for UCLA. It shaved exactly five points off Florida's halftime lead from 2006.

You take your lovely parting gifts where you can get them.

As for the rest of UCLA's first back-to-back Final Four in three decades? The ride to and from the Georgia Dome had to be nice. The cheerleaders were ... what's a good word for extraordinary?

Chris Richard and Joakim Noah are back in the title game. (AP)

Florida, actually -- aka The Gators That Ate Atlanta, the supposed focus of this column. (If I can just get my eyes off the eye candy.)

But if the cheer girls were tres hot, Florida was trey hot.

After putting the Wooden to the Bruins.

Again.

The defending champs won by 10 but it seemed like 27, which was the football team's margin in the BCS title game -- or one more point than the Gators beat Ohio State in basketball in December.

The message from the Fab Florida Five? The team that stays together, preys together. Saturday's 76-66 victory was every bit as dominating as the 16-point sand-blasting of UCLA in Indianapolis.

Actually more, considering Joakim Noah and Al Horford had more rebounds (28) than the UCLA assemblage that rode that team bus to the dome (26). More because Florida led by 11 last year at halftime of the championship game. It was only six this year.

No one worth their chomp was worried.

"Revenge is so overrated, especially in basketball," Noah said of UCLA's motivation. "Revenge, you're worrying about what happened last year? That's a problem. Our whole motto as a team this year was live in the moment."

The moment has lasted a year after Noah and his fellow four starters promised to come back and do it again.