Don’t bother trying to e-mail Bruce Weber to congratulate him on Illinois’ trip to the Final Four. The coach’s University e-mail account was shut down a month ago.

If you call his cell phone, chances are he won’t respond to a voicemail, either. Bruce Almighty says there’s no way he can return all the calls he’s gotten lately.

As Illinois approaches the most important weekend in college basketball, the best place to find Weber may be on television. You can tune in to one of the up to 15 radio and TV shows Weber appears on each week; in the next few days he’ll be on CNN and ESPN’s PTI. When Illinois beat Arizona on Saturday, there were 40 cameras in the locker room. In case Chicago Tribune and News-Gazette coverage don’t satisfy your appetite for Illini hoops, you can also find Weber – and pretty much every player – pictured in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the LA Times.

Through over four months as the most-lauded team in the NCAA, Illinois men’s basketball has seen a steady rise in its fan base, its postseason expectations and, ultimately, its media attention. The floodlights invaded the Ubben Indoor Practice Facility on Dec. 2, a day after Illinois hammered then-No. 1 Wake Forest. That day Weber did at least 10 interviews, kicking off a season in which the coach has lived in the spotlight.

“Really the whole season we’ve been blessed with national coverage,” Weber said. “When we’ve had our chance to shine we’ve shined, so we’ve gotten some great publicity.”

The glare will only get brighter when the team arrives in St. Louis.

Attention from across the country is good and bad; the publicity is ideal for a program like Illinois, which has struggled for years to be seen among the college basketball elite, yet it means an increased and often taxing strain on players, coaches and staff.

“It’s a continuous commercial for your program,” Weber said.

That commercial has found a broader audience this season than anyone could have predicted a year ago. In 2003-04, Illinois finished 26-7 overall and 13-3 in the Big Ten. Back then, about 130 media representatives covered each Illinois home game. This year the number soared past 200 per game, forcing a section of Assembly Hall’s C-level to be reserved for journalists who couldn’t squeeze onto press row.

When the Illini hit the road, they’ve set records for the number of media credential requests at Indiana, Iowa, Purdue and Wisconsin. At the first round of the NCAA tournament in Indianapolis, there were as many reporters as normally cover the Final Four. And when the team headed to the Allstate Arena last weekend, 140 credentialed media came just to see the Illini.

The three other teams had a combined 100 journalists covering them.

“It’s not like we’re coming from nowhere,” said Sports Information Director Kent Brown. “We’ve certainly gotten our fair share of attention nationally. But there’s something about being No. 1, especially for 14-straight weeks.”

Last year the post-game and press conference questions centered on the coaching change, off-the-court problems and a new offense. Early this year, reporters asked if the team had known before Wake Forest that it could play up to this level. Then the question was if Illinois could go undefeated. Now everybody from St. Petersburg, Fla., to San Diego wants to know if the Illini can go all the way.

Illinois has seen this attention in the past. Last year in the Sweet Sixteen, the media storm was violent. But that is normal for the NCAA tournament, Kent Brown said. This year has been completely different, with the interest staying strong for four months.

“It’s a few times in a lifetime that you get to work with a team that’s recognized at this level for this long,” Kent Brown said.

Players are learning to cope with their fame. Texas newspapers are racing to Champaign to report on Lone Star State natives Deron Williams and Jack Ingram. Williams spent Easter being interviewed by CBS. ESPN The Magazine followed the whole team on a road trip to Michigan.

With his trademark headband, knee socks and mouth guard, Dee Brown draws the most publicity. He was on the cover of Sports Illustrated on March 7 and the Sporting News a week later, as well as almost every midwestern newspaper’s sports section. He says he tries not to watch the TV reports of Illinois games and doesn’t read the magazines. He says he is just in the game because he loves basketball. Still, he knows getting the national attention is a dream most amateur athletes never realize.

“It’s a privilege to be in the paper if somebody writes a story about us or even about me,” Dee Brown said. “But on the other hand, I’d just rather play basketball and have fun.”

Weber said that this week, more than ever, he wants things to be normal. He hopes the players can go to class without much distraction and can focus on exams, papers and projects rather than on the pressure to pull out a victory Saturday. Players are off-limits to the media until they practice in St. Louis on Friday.

It helps that all five starters are upperclassmen who’ve experienced media scrutiny in the past, but the coaches still worry about it becoming a part of the players’ daily routines.

Weber and Kent Brown have worked throughout the season to strike a balance between exposure and normalcy. Wanting to be accessible to the media – and ultimately to fans – is important to the team, but they don’t want the press to interfere with the basketball.

“I know with myself, all the attention has taken a toll,” Weber said. “I asked a couple of the kids, Kent and I have talked about it, it’s that fine line. We want to be accessible, we want you guys (the media) to be involved, but at the same time it wears on you.”

There’s a lot of incentive for Illinois to allow journalists the maximum-possible access to the team. Good press means good things for players hoping to make it in the NBA. The positive publicity that comes with a great athletic team usually means more students applying to the University. And perhaps most importantly, expanded coverage is not just consumed by the general fan population, but by recruits nationwide.

“It’s a huge benefit when you’re leading off the SportsCenter highlights, and your score is the very first one to appear on the bottom of the screen, and they’re talking about Illinois basketball on ESPN every day,” Kent Brown said.

Weber hopes the team’s success will help bring in top recruits. When teams establish reputations like those of basketball powerhouses North Carolina and Duke, they can easily sign the nation’s best high school players. Kids watch great basketball teams when they are young and still have emotional attachments to those programs when they are old enough to play in college.

It’s a situation Weber’s been on the losing side of recently, when Julian Wright chose Kansas – and former Illini coach Bill Self – over Illinois this year, but the Naismith Coach of the Year has been dealing with it since his days as an assistant.

“When I first got to Purdue, we couldn’t touch the kids in Indiana, because of what Coach (Bobby) Knight had done, going to the Final Four, winning national championships, the Olympics,” Weber said. “We’d go talk to kids, and they were nice to us, then you go in their room and it’s all Indiana stuff.”

There’s only one way to make sure recruits have Illini posters hanging on their walls at home, and Weber knows this team’s success is a step in the right direction. That’s why he stayed at the Allstate Arena after the team bus left Saturday night to do live spots on the late local news. It’s why he got up early Sunday morning to spend Easter giving radio and TV interviews. And it’s why he sticks around after press conferences officially end, sometimes answering questions for another half hour so that each reporter gets all the information he needs.

While the constant interviews, appearances and attention can be draining, especially this late in the season, the Illini know to make the most of the positive publicity that doesn’t come around very often.

“This is the kind of attention that you can’t pay for,” Kent Brown said.