Fighting Illini enjoy unusual home advantage with Chicago Sweet 16 game

CHICAGO -- For many of the Illini players and fans, Thursday's NCAA regional semifinal game will be just like a trip home.\nFour of the No. 1 seed's starters are from the Chicago area -- Dee Brown (Maywood), James Augustine (Mokena), Luther Head (Chicago) and Roger Power Jr. (Joliet). \nAlmost 60 percent of the University's students come from the Chicago area, and about 140,000 alumni of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign live in the metropolitan area, along with thousands more who graduated from Illinois-Chicago.\n"Illinois flags are all over the place," said Chicago Alderman Tom Tunney, himself a 1977 UI graduate.\nAsked if he's been following the Illinois basketball team, with its 34-1 record this season, he said, "Who hasn't? It's a national phenomenon."\nMany of the school's famous graduates have ties to Chicago, including Hugh Hefner, who started his Playboy empire here; Chicago-born Dick Butkus, who played for the Chicago Bears; and Robert Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic who writes for the Chicago Sun-Times and holds an "Overlooked Film Festival" in Urbana each year.\nSome large suburban Chicago schools send more than 100 students from each graduating class to the University of Illinois, which enrolls 28,000 undergraduates and 10,000 graduate students.\nThe university is so popular with Chicago kids it even has a restaurant serving Chicago-style deep dish pizza -- Papa Del's.\n"Chicago is the key city for the University of Illinois, for its natural well-being -- from recruiting students to recruiting student-athletes to identifying alumni," said Vanessa Faurie, a spokeswoman for the Alumni Association. "And it's close enough that mentors and counselors for students in Urbana can be tapped from the Chicago area."\nTerri Egan Lane, head of the Chicago Illini Club, said the basketball team's success this year has been wonderful for alumni morale. Bars and restaurants across the city have been calling her, asking to be endorsed as "official game viewing sites."\nIn fact, Lane said she is getting a bit frustrated by people constantly stopping her on the street, asking if she could find them NCAA Tournament tickets. (She can't, by the way.)\n"What am I, Ticketmaster?" she said.\nOne sign of the demand from Illini fans: Four tickets to see the Illini play Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Thursday were being offered for $1,200 on eBay, with the caption reading "Root the Illini on!"\nAt the Chicago-area Campus Colors stores, which specialize in collegiate apparel, sales of Illini gear are up 400 percent this year compared to last, said Jon Rubenstein, the company's vice president. The store carries gear from 250 schools, but UI is the state's flagship university and it's just a two-hour drive away.\n"Illinois has always been a good school for us, but this year it's kind of crazy," Rubenstein said. "Anything in orange is hot."\nBrothers Adam and Mark Reinhart of Cincinnati spent Tuesday in a downtown store with their parents debating which Illini gear to get. Adam, 12, settled on a jersey and shorts.\nEight-year-old Mark, meanwhile, picked an orange, long-sleeved hooded sweatshirt with "Fighting Illini" on the front. Why?\n"Two reasons. First, I like Illinois," he said. "And number two, I like orange"