Next, perhaps the best-known of all basketball Cinderellas, the 1954 Milan Indiana High School team that were the subjects of the movie Hoosiers confront another Midwestern legend, a man who was born poor but would remake global industry and create a breathtaking fortune in the process: Henry Ford.
The Greek national soccer team of 2004 that stunned the football world by winning the European Championships then encounters a man who knows a thing or two about adversity, who quit school at age 15 to help support his family and then built one of Asia's greatest business empires: Hong Kong investor Li Ka-Shing.
Finally, we see the stars of one of the most improbable sports success stories of the recent past, the 2008-09 Afghan National Cricket Team, which came from nowhere to win Division 5, 4, and 3 championships and qualify for the ICC World Cup. Their opponents? The battered Swedish banking system of the early 1990s, which recovered so well that when the rest of the financial world was rocked by trouble in the crisis of 2008-2009, it was hailed and studied as a model for doing things right.
The Elite Eight
Not surprisingly -- and totally appropriately -- the winners of this all-Cinderella tournament produced some heartwarming victories and for some, the disheartening tolling of midnight as their time as belles of the ball came to an end.
The feisty Israelis easily defeated the New York Jets thanks to a very different idea of what air superiority could mean in such a contest. This set them up in a battle with the United States of America, which handily crushed the BC Lions given the fact that the United States is a nuclear superpower while the Canadian Football League isn't even the third-best football conference in North America. (Lagging behind both the NFL and college football's SEC.)
The "do you believe in miracles?" boys of Lake Placid may have put their Russian rivals' hopes on ice but they could hardly hold their own against Genghis's Mongolian Hordes. And while JK Rowling may have conjured up an end to He Who Must Not Be Named, she was no match for the gutsy Japanese 11, whose rise from the mid-ranks of women's soccer was more breathtaking than any Quidditch contest.
Francis Ouimet went on to become a successful businessman and an ambassador for the sport of golf. But he was no match against Diocletian, who would have won by virtue of his full name alone (Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus Augustus) even had he not won the Battle of the Margus, defeated the Sarmatians, the Carpi, and the Persians and brought stability to the empire.
Hoosier spunk faced a formidable foe with the man who built the modern automobile industry, but Ford was disqualified for his virulent anti-Semitism -- a trait that won him the Nazis' Grand Cross of the German Eagle, their highest award given to a foreigner, not to mention the enduring admiration of many really, really bad men including Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Shirach.
In a more uplifting victory, the Greek national soccer team was awarded a sentimental victory over Li Ka-shing because, well, he is rich and Greece, well, not so much.
Finally, because the Afghan National Cricket Team didn't actually advance in the Cricket World Cup (and because cricket is appallingly boring and pointless), the Swedish banking system edged them out in the final match of the round.
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