NC State's incredible run continues into Sweet 16

When North Carolina State ended its regular season on a four-game losing streak (while also losing seven out of nine games) its NCAA Tournament hopes seemed bleak. Maybe even hopeless. Just a couple of weeks later, however, they now find themselves in the Sweet 16 thanks to Saturday's 79-73 win over No. 14 seed Oakland.

It continues what has been a magical run for the Wolfpack that started in the ACC Tournament and has continued through the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament.

They will play the winner of Sunday's Colorado vs. Marquette game this week. 

NC State's only real hope to make the tournament was to run the table in the ACC Tournament, and it did exactly that by pulling off some massive upsets along the way, including wins over Duke, Virginia and North Carolina, with the latter coming in the conference championship game. 

That gave the Wolfpack an automatic bid into the tournament and a No. 11 seed. 

It was there that they would upset Texas Tech (with an impressive 80-67 win) in the round of 64 before dispatching Oakland and ending its Cinderella run in the round of 32. 

There are a lot of impressive things about this run for the Wolfpack.

For one, it has seen them play seven games over an 11-day stretch, including two overtime games. Despite that workload fatigue has not yet started to set in for them and they actually got stronger in Saturday's overtime with a 9-1 run to pull away and take control. 

The other is that it has seen them beat some of the nation's top teams. Duke, North Carolina and Texas Tech were all among the top-25 teams in the country, while Duke and North Carolina had previously beaten them by a combined 24 points during the aforementioned regular season losing streak. 

They are probably going to be one of the most surprising teams to reach the Sweet 16 this season. It was probably not a realistic dream for even their most optimistic fans two weeks ago. They needed to start winning with no margin for error. Now that they have started winning they do not seem ready to stop.