CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- It's rare that a team's glue guy is also its best player.

Often, the glue guy is the less-talented but harder-working sixth man. The guy who can rally the other, more talented guys to play to their potential, thereby maximizing his own.

But in the uncommon instance that the glue guy is also the go-to guy, special things can happen.

MIT has certainly learned that.

"Actually. Mitch has been on a roll the whole year, it's just being magnified now because of the stage that we're on," Engineers coach Larry Anderson said, referring to point guard Mitchell Kates. "Mitch was the final piece to the puzzle. I went out of my way to do everything I could to get him to just look at us. And from day one he's had the basketball in his hands.

"And we knew he was pretty good on the basketball court, but the way Mitch has grown and the way he's helped our basketball team is his leadership and being able to give up a lot of things that he can do individually on the basketball court to make other guys better around him.

"He's our glue guy, and he's probably our best player, too," the coach said.

Kates averaged 14.3 points and 5.4 assists a game this season, as the Engineers ran roughshod through their schedule with only one regular-season loss (at home to WPI) on their way to a No. 3 national ranking, a NEWMAC title and their current spot in the Division III Final Four.

In the postseason, the junior is putting up numbers to dwarf those averages.

“

Freshman year, I would be very concerned about myself and how I was playing. ... I think as I got older, I started to step a little bit out of that, to 'Noel's not playing well, what do I gotta do to get him more involved in the game?' .

” -- MIT point guard Mitchell Kates

"He's been playing great," senior sharpshooter Jamie Karraker said. "He's been matched up against some of the best point guards in the country and he's really, really stepped up to the challenge. He knows that in these games we've really needed him to step up and he has."

In MIT's Sweet 16 game against Staten Island, Kates knew he had to score and responded with a game-high 29 points. In the Elite Eight matchup with Franklin & Marshall, he didn't score as much (21 points) but had eight assists in the 15-point win.

Kates, from Colts Neck, N.J., had options coming out of high school. He considered NYU, Williams and a number of other Division III schools.

"Once I found out about here and I learned about MIT as a basketball program -- I knew about it as a school obviously for a while -- I knew it would be the best fit for me," Kates said. "It was an up-and-coming program, which is a great opportunity. I knew that the kids coming in with me in my class, we had a chance to do something really special here."

The Engineers, in other words, had the feel of a start-up.

"I find it's very exciting to be involved with a small group of people trying to start something new," Kates said, referring to his work experience doing Web design for a couple of start-ups. "I never found great appeal with the big companies where you're working on something day-in and day-out the same task. I want something that's new, challenging and that's changing every day."

MIT finished 21-9 the year before Kates, Will Tashman and transfer Noel Hollingsworth arrived on campus. Three years later, the Engineers are 29-1 and will play the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in the Final Four in Salem, Va., on Friday for a chance to play in the national title game on Saturday.

And that, ultimately, is the goal.

"We set goals before the beginning of the season and one of the goals was to win a national championship," Karraker said. "And we only set goals we believe are realistic. And so we've believed throughout the whole season that we could win the national championship.

"Getting to the Final Four wasn't a goal of ours, just winning a national championship," he said.

Anderson said the goals don't come from him, but are a "shared vision" of the team. That fits with Anderson's idea of having the players take ownership of the team, leading it themselves instead of looking for the coach to lead from the bench.

The goals the Engineers set weren't abstractions, they were distinct and broken down into the components necessary to achieve them.

"The nuts and bolts is what you need in order to be able to achieve something at a high level," Anderson said. "We had a vision for what we wanted to do, but that vision was broken down into every single practice and one game at a time."

As the point guard and a team leader, Kates has taken it on himself to ensure his teammates keep their minds in the game, in the practice, in the weight room session.

He admits that he's gotten better at that as time's gone by.

"Freshman year, I would be very concerned about myself and how I was playing," Kates said. "And so I would be missing shots and I'd be thinking, 'How am I gonna make shots, how am I gonna make more plays?'

"I think as I got older," Kates said, "I started to step a little bit out of that, to 'Noel's not playing well, what do I gotta do to get him more involved in the game?' "

He's learned to subjugate himself for the good of the team, and both he and the team have flourished because of it.

Now Kates & Co. are just two wins away from fulfilling their ultimate goal.

"It's exciting but there's also a little bit of nerves to go along with that," Kates said. "I mean, the road to get here has been a fun one, but when you're so close obviously you just wanna take it really badly and that's all you think about until it happens."

Jack McCluskey is an editor for ESPN.com and a frequent contributor to ESPNBoston.com.