UConn's greatness is profound and mundane

Even against a legend, Dan Hurley's Huskies did what they now always do

You could feel it for a minute — just for a minute. That anxious rising in your chest. That edgy joyous anticipation. That sense that something great and special was about to happen, even if you had no idea exactly what would come next.

It is a sensation exclusive to sports. It’s the reason we do any of this stuff, why we remain so hopelessly in love with it, even while the carelessly constructed surrounding business of selling our beloved games strains to more ruthlessly exploit our devotion to them. It is the feeling that makes all of it worth doing: the football stadiums, the crazy ticket prices, the callousness toward tradition, the Frankenstein conferences, the dire mass sports media landscape. That feeling is at the center of it all. It is college basketball’s inextinguishable soul.

You could feel it in the first half of the 2024 national title game, in the early stages of a matchup that still threatened to live fully up to their billing. More specifically: It was reasonable to think, for a brief period of time, that one of the greatest college basketball players ever might just be good enough to beat UConn by himself.

Zach Edey, the reigning two-time national player of the year, began the game 7-of-9 from the field. The early, unusual physical challenges he faced from opposing center Donovan Clingan — a couple of well-challenged post moves that led to bad shots, even a fading one-footed make — had calmed, Edey had adjusted, and then he got about the business of taking over the game: 11 of his team’s first 16 points, 16 of its first-half 30, a remarkable, reproducible ability to treat the best team in the country, featuring one of its best big men, in a title fight between the two best teams in the sport, like a Thursday night home game against Minnesota.

Edey had to fight and claw, sure, and as UConn’s defense flew around him, you couldn’t help but notice that nobody else in a Purdue uniform seemed to be all that involved. Concerning. But still: The 7-foot-4 titan was scoring at will, dominating on defense — at the 13:45 mark, he had two stunning blocks on the same possession — and carrying his team the way the all-timers do. A legendary player was putting together a legendary individual performance, willing his team over the top. For a minute there, you actually wondered if he might really pull it off.

And then, well, UConn happened.

What else can you say about it? UConn happened, as they happened to Alabama, as they happened to Illinois, as they now always happen. Perhaps the greatest complement you can pay to the 2024 national champions — to Dan Hurley, to his coaching staff, to his players, to the blueblood program he has both rebuilt and elevated — is that the moment of their most profound greatness also felt entirely mundane. The second best team in the country played hard, did its best, threw the ball to its 7-foot-4 star a lot, and ultimately proved utterly powerless against its opponent, who make even the sport’s most powerful forces look feckless in the end.

“It's up there in terms of the greatest two-year runs that a program maybe has ever had,” Dan Hurley said at the press conference podium. “It’s the best two-year run I think in a very, very long time just because of everything we lost from last year's team. To lose that much and do what we did again — it's got to be as impressive a two-year run as a program's had.”

On Monday night, by a final score of 75-60, Connecticut won its sixth game of the 2024 NCAA Tournament. It was their 12th tournament win in a row. It was their 12th tournament win in a row by at least 13 points. It cemented the largest combined margin of victory — 140 points — of any NCAA Tournament champion, from a team winning its second straight.

In the entire 2024 tourney, all 240 minutes of it, UConn trailed for precisely six minutes and 22 seconds.

“Think about that,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said. And so you try.