Doing the big dance!

I remember the days well, when the Connecticut Huskies losing to Holy Cross was just another day in the basketball season.  There was no "wait 'til next year!" it just was.  In my freshman year at Hamden High School, an athlete named Scott Burrell graduated and went on to play a big part in changing that.  First he had to turn down an offer from the Seattle Mariners.  Once past that hurdle, he joined a UCONN Husky squad that included Chris Smith, Tate George and Nadav Henefeld.  They would go 31-6, collecting a Big East Conference Championship and an appearance in the Elite Eight, eventually falling to tournament runner up Duke.  That was a year where whoever went to the finals would have to face a UNLV team that was and may still be unrivaled.  But for those of us in Connecticut, this will be the crowning moment for the year that truly gave birth to Husky-mania:



To us, what would later happen in 1999, 2004, and 2011 was only a matter of time; and none of us doubted it.

Tonight, Kevin Ollie's and his crew will face their toughest opponent this season in a Kentucky Wildcat team loaded with the most talented people in the college game today.  It is a typical experience of the UCONN fanbase that we find ourselves here, not expecting it, but also not surprised.  The nature of our experience as fans is to know that this program always has the potential to deliver, but typically stays below the radar of the national spotlight.  Regardless of the outcome tonight, I am so proud to have experienced this evolution from a Big East pushover into a humble, yet tenacious and determined program that refuses to back down from anyone.  Part of their legacy is forcing people to come up with excuses for why UCONN busted their bracket predictions.  Many of them still refuse to acknowledge that the program continues to do so by its own merit.  We hope they keep talking that way. 

Since moving to Ohio, I've come to know many Kentucky fans that are very good friends of mine.  Kentucky has a passionate fanbase.  Those that are my good friends are great fans of the game and their team.  There are some that I know more casually who view their basketball team as an extension of some kind of weird culture war that means that their team wins because people from that part of the country are more polite and have better values; and they'll be the first to tell you that very loudly or with the ALL CAPS FACEBOOK STATUSES ABOUT HOW GREAT PEOPLE FROM KENTUCKY ARE AND HOW MUCH EVERYONE ELSE IS INFERIOR IN ALL ASPECTS OF LIFE (the irony of how this is the exact opposite of the politeness they mention as an aspect of their superiority being completely lost on them).

In Connecticut, it was never like this for us.  UCONN winning or losing is the result of the efforts of student athletes that we are proud to win and lose with, and the results are in no way linked to any kind of cultural superiority or inferiority of their opponents.  It's about pride in building a program of men and women, and while the notion of a student athlete is often written off as a misnomer, Connecticut has graduated many of their great players from the Mens and Womens programs who have gone on to use their education to accomplish great things.  Humility, tenacity, and determination are what defines our programs, and what will determine the outcome of the men's championship tonight, and the women's championship against Notre Dame tomorrow night.  Connecticut is the only school to have both teams win a national championship in the same year and now they have a chance to repeat that historic feat.  This opportunity is because of the values that these programs champion, and our fans don't credit our culture for it, we draw inspiration from it about how to become better people ourselves.