SAN FRANCISCO — Florida’s Todd Golden hopes a visit to his old coaching grounds will be just a brief stopover on the Gators’ way back to the center of the college basketball stage. Meanwhile, Maryland hero Derik Queen makes the trip to the West Coast with the opportunity to grow his profile on a national stage.Those two forces come together Thursday night, when the top-seeded Gators (32-4) face the No. 4 Terrapins (27-8) in an NCAA Tournament West Region semifinal at Chase Center.Golden was the head coach at the University of San Francisco from 2019 to 2022. In his final season there, the Dons won 22 games and qualified for the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 24 seasons.”It’s kind of icing on the cake to be able to go out there,” Golden told the Gainesville Sun. He added that seeing “a lot of friends and family and people that will kind of support our program as adopting the Gators out west will be awesome.”More awesome for the Gators would be a pair of victories vaulting them to their first Final Four since 2014. They have not had a longer stretch without reaching college basketball’s final weekend since their first appearance in 1994.”The time was now for us to take that next step,” Golden said Sunday after Florida eliminated two-time defending champion UConn 77-75 in the second round in Raleigh, N.C. “Being in the Sweet 16 is a great step in the right direction.To get there, the Gators will lean heavily as usual on Walter Clayton Jr., the team’s leader in scoring (17.9 ppg) and assists (4.2). Clayton scored 23 points against the Huskies, including 13 in the final eight minutes. He made two crucial 3-pointers down the stretch.”My teammates, like I said, they give me the ball and put trust in me to be able to shoot those shots,” he said.Maryland’s trust in Queen, a true freshman who was the Big Ten Freshman of the Year and is projected as an NBA lottery pick in June, only heightened after he demanded the ball on the Terrapins’ final possession, then put in a nearly impossible fadeaway bank shot from the far left wing to beat No. 12 Colorado State 72-71 on Sunday.