With only eight teams still standing in the NCAA tournament, we see two of the four regional finals today as top-seeded Connecticut takes on Missouri in the desert and Big East powers Pittsburgh and Villanova do battle 3,000 miles away with a chance to reach the Final Four in Detroit next week. Find out who's still alive and who's going home with more analysis from Saturday's Elite Eight games.

West Regional: Connecticut 82, Missouri 75

When junior shooting guard Jerome Dyson went down for the year with a torn lateral meniscus on his right knee, Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun knew that reaching the final weekend of the college basketball season would be an even steeper mountain for his team to climb. But while the Huskies struggled without Dyson for the last month of the regular season, freshman speedster Kemba Walker came into his own, maturing into the impact player that many expected him. And on Saturday afternoon in Glendale, Ariz., the 6-foot-1 Bronx product put his team on his back, carrying top-seeded UConn past No. 3 seed Missouri and into the Final Four with an 82-75 victory. Senior point guard A.J. Price didn't have his best game despite scoring 18 points, but Walker gave the Huskies a spark off the bench with a career-high 23 points in 25 minutes, shooting 7-for-9 from the floor and 9-for-10 from the free-throw line while also tallying five assists and five rebounds. Missouri, meanwhile, only got 25 points combined from its top two scorers in seniors DeMarre Carroll (12 points) and Leo Lyons (13 points), as Mike Anderson's team struggled from beyond the arc with just a 27.8-percent clip. UConn, despite the win, was actually worse from long range, making only two of 12 from three, but a dominant performance on the glass (a 45-26 advantage) and 25 points from veteran forwards Stanley Robinson (13 points) and Jeff Adrien (12 points) were too much for Mizzou to overcome down the stretch.

 East Regional: Villanova 78, Pittsburgh 76

This is what March Madness is all about. In a game that saw lead change after lead change, this instant classic went down to the wire and needed a last-second shot in the lane from Villanova point guard Scottie Reynolds for the third-seeded Wildcats to escape with a 78-76 win in Boston. And for the first time since shocking Georgetown and Patrick Ewing in the 1985 NCAA championship game, the Wildcats are headed back to the Final Four with a meeting with either No. 1 seed North Carolina or No. 2 seed Oklahoma. Reynolds managed to pull off the game-winner with 0.5 seconds left, but the 6-foot-2 junior struggled on the offensive end, shooting 4-for-11 from the field and 0-for-3 from three to finish with 15 points, two rebounds and one assist. Instead, it was Dwayne Anderson and Dante Cunningham who did the work inside for 'Nova, combining for 32 points on 11-for-21 shooting. The Panthers, meanwhile, got another huge performance from Sam Young, who finished his career at Pitt with a game-high 28 points and seven rebounds, and DeJuan Blair got his fair share of offensive opportunities down on the block, chipping in 20 points and 10 rebounds and staying out of foul trouble for the most part. But in the end, the 'Cats had just a little more left than Jamie Dixon's team, which has no reason to hang its head despite failing to advance to the school's second Final Four and also becoming the first No. 1 seed to fall in this year's NCAA tournament.

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