The Michigan basketball team, much like the 2009 team, ended the season strong and enters the off-season full of optimism.

Icon Sports Media

The Michigan basketball team took a Final Four favorite to the brink of defeat in the first weekend of the NCAA tournament, and is returning all of its stars and looks to be returning to relevancy.

Welcome back to 2009. History is repeating itself in Ann Arbor.

Expectations rose dramatically for Wolverines after they were
within three points of No. 2-seed Oklahoma down the stretch of their 2009 tournament game. Entering the 2009-10 season, Michigan was being discussed as a candidate to win the Big Ten title and maybe a potential Final Four team. That team finished 15-17.

That experience seems so far away to this year's Michigan team, which finds itself on the brink of similar expectations after pushing No. 1 seed Duke to the final buzzer on Sunday. But it should be a reminder of just how fleeting success can be.

Optimism is already high for the 2011-12 season. With every player expected to return, there has been early discussion that Michigan might appear in preseason top 10 polls and be a candidate to win the Big Ten.

Sound familiar?

“The fact that (the fallback) happened should be enough to make sure that it doesn’t happen again,” Michigan guard Zack Novak said. “We’ve already started to make the guys fully aware of exactly what transpired and how disappointed we were at that season, as long as a season as I’ve ever been through.

“It’s just going to take our leadership.”

There is the difference between the 2009-10 and 2011-12 teams. Leadership.

That 2009-10 team returned its best players - Manny Harris and Deshawn Sims - but lost its two team leaders, C.J. Lee and David Merritt. The Wolverines spent the summer searching for someone to replace them and found Sims and Harris weren’t as vocal as they needed to be. Novak tried to lead, but the then-sophomore could only do so much as he had his own on-court struggles.

There are no questions who the leaders are entering this off-season. Novak and Stu Douglass will be returning senior captains. Darius Morris has led the Wolverines on the court and has become a locker room voice.

Those three together are perhaps the most critical components for Michigan staying on an upward trend.

“This should be viewed as some type of prosperity,” Michigan coach John Beilein said after Sunday's loss to Duke. “They made the NCAA tournament, advanced through the first round and were inches away from a win. But we have to turn that around to hunger to feel this, to feel this prosperity and want more of it.”

That is where the leadership comes in. Beilein said he isn’t concerned about the Wolverines in that area heading into next season but acknowledged “human nature” can be a difficult thing.

That's why he planned on starting individual workouts at the end of this week, to keep Michigan’s players focused on next season already.

“(We’re) going in the right direction,” Novak said. “Just want to make sure we’re going that way. Don’t have any lapses.

“Give us another year, and I think we can be a pretty dangerous team.”

Michael Rothstein covers Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at 734-623-2558, by email at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein.