On a list of all the people, places and things that needed a buzzer-beater Sunday night, Sean Ellenby was not at the tippy-top. The Maryland men’s basketball team, trailing Colorado State by one point late in their second-round NCAA tournament game, needed a buzzer-beater more. Terps freshman star Derik Queen, who got the ball at the top of the Rams’ 3-point arc with 3.7 seconds remaining, needed it more. An uncharacteristically sleepy March Madness needed it more.

Ellenby, watching the game from his Chicago apartment with his wife, needed a buzzer-beater for personal reasons: He’s a Maryland graduate, former athletic department employee at the school and long-suffering Terps fan. But he also needed it for professional reasons.

“This tournament has not had a ton of buzzer-beaters or moments,” said Ellenby, the director of marketing and communications for Campus Ink’s name, image and likeness store, which allows student-athletes to profit off apparel sales. “We’re always watching for moments — and we got our moment.”

Queen’s banked-in fadeaway jumper sent the fourth-seeded Terps to the Sweet 16, where they’ll face top-seeded Florida on Thursday in San Francisco, and set in motion a potentially lucrative week for the Baltimore native. Overnight, Queen had become a big shot in the sport, and in March that means big business.

While the financial ramifications of Maryland’s 72-71 win are unclear — Queen’s marketing manager and NIL officials at the school could not be reached for comment — the NIL opportunities are abundant. Maribeth Kuzmeski, a marketing professor at Oklahoma State who has developed coursework on NIL, said deals can be worth “six figures, and sometimes a lot more,” as brands look to capitalize on a college basketball star’s one shining moment.

“You can get a lot of exposure as a business with somebody that nobody knew yesterday but everybody knows today,” Kuzmeski said. “And that’s just the kind of thing that businesses want. They want to be able to hop on to that, whether it’s the Cinderella opportunity or just somebody that nobody knew.”

Queen was not exactly a nobody before Saturday. He was already an established star in the Big Ten Conference, earning league Freshman of the Year honors, and a known commodity in corners of the advertising world, too. In August, Queen partnered with Jimmy’s Famous Seafood. Ahead of the NCAA tournament, he signed deals with DoorDash and the drinkware company Stanley.

But Queen’s buzzer-beater Sunday created its own kind of cottage industry: commemorative, licensed merchandise. A new licensing agreement with the NCAA meant that companies like Campus Ink could, for the first time, sell Sweet 16-branded team apparel, with athletes earning royalties off their sales.

Ellenby’s hope was that the real collectors’ items, however, would be Queen-inspired pieces. In his postgame interview, Queen was asked where his confidence to demand the Terps’ final shot came from. “I’m from Baltimore,” he said. “That’s why.”

“Right there, we knew: That’s the shirt,” Ellenby said. “That’s what has to go out. You’re also just watching social media, too, like, ‘What are people saying? What’s catching fire? What’s hitting people in their emotions?’ And it was that line.”

Ellenby and his colleagues began their own mad scramble. An apparel designer went to work on the merchandise. A website operations designer built a home for the shirts and sweatshirts on the site. Ellenby reached out to Queen’s marketing manager and school officials to sign off on their licensed merchandise. Only about an hour after Queen’s shot and viral interview, Campus Ink’s NIL Store had Queen-quoting shirts ready for purchase.

“Every second matters in terms of really creating that pop,” Ellenby said. “There’s a wow factor — the faster that you can get that product out, [the better you can] really capitalize on that high emotional wave that that fans are riding at that time.”

In Wilmington, North Carolina, Jamie Mottram was watching Queen with interest, too. Mottram, the president of BreakingT, which specializes in moment-driven sports apparel, has been a Terps fan since Maryland’s heyday decades ago under former coach Gary Williams. After Queen’s shot swished through, amid the euphoria of his celebration, Mottram joked that he pushed his son so hard that he “flew across the room,” landing on another couch.

Within minutes, the gears of BreakingT’s ecommerce operation started clicking into place. After a handful of licensed T-shirts were designed and cleared with Maryland officials — Mottram was especially thrilled by a design inspired by Willard’s own postgame interview, in which he offered a censored Queen quote from the Terps’ final huddle: “Give me the MF ball” — the apparel made its way to the company’s website, to social media, to Amazon.com and to a handful of Maryland “influencers.”

“They know that their audiences are going to like it,” Mottram said.

Retailers were interested, too. Dick’s Sporting Goods and the sports apparel chain Rally House placed orders for Queen- and “Crab Five”-related gear at brick-and-mortar locations in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, Mottram said.

On the NIL Store and BreakingT, customers have welcomed Maryland’s first Sweet 16 appearance since 2016 with open arms and opened wallets. Ellenby said Queen and Maryland were the site’s top-selling athlete and top-selling team Sunday, respectively. Mottram said Monday that Maryland’s win was on track to be one of the three biggest “moments” in the company’s brief history of NCAA tournament-inspired apparel, after only North Carolina’s Final Four win over Duke in 2022 — Blue Devils coach Mike Krzyzewski’s final game — and North Carolina State’s run to the Final Four last season, which also featured a Duke loss.

“It’s very early, so it’s really hard to say,” Mottram said of Maryland’s run, “but it stands up there, I think, with the recent NCAA tournament sensations.”

All of which could translate into a windfall for Queen and the Terps. NIL royalty rates vary by school, but they generally range between 20% and 35% of the sale, meaning Queen, Maryland and the school’s NIL collective could earn about $15 on every $50 of licensed merchandise sold.

“I think it’s wonderful for the student-athlete,” said Kuzmeski, the Oklahoma State professor. “I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to be able to shoot the game-winning shot and then get opportunities to make some money when you could never do that before. I mean, we’ve got team managers making money in NIL. It’s opened up a world of possibilities for student-athletes, and I love that.”

Not every NIL deal is as automated as T-shirt sales, though. Agents and lawyers are often needed, said Kuzmeski, who warned of the fine print included in some contracts. Professional management can also act as a buffer, keeping student-athletes focused on their next practice and their next game, not their next deal.

There will be plenty of opportunities for a talent like Queen, and Kuzmeski said Queen’s management could afford to be proactive. On Wednesday, Queen tweeted an ad for TurboTax urging followers not to “wait till the final buzzer” to get their taxes done. Perhaps a partnership with, say, Dairy Queen could come next? It wouldn’t hurt to make the pitch, Kuzmeski said.

“He’s already a great player. He has NIL deals. He’s making money. This isn’t new to him,” she added. “But what’s new to him is all of the attention. And you’ve just got to stay focused. And that’s the hardest thing, because everybody probably wants to talk to him and interview him. And it’s just like, ‘No, no, we have basketball to play.‘”