Birth of a Husky Nation--Five Moments that Define Connecticut's Obsession with UConn Men's Basketball

I have to admit that I’m inclined to snigger whenever I see the stadium of a SEC football factory teaming with fans who I’m inclined to believe have absolutely no personal affiliation with the school other than a shared state of domicile. It’s one of the most shameless forms of what Kurt Vonnegut called “granfalloon.” Naturally, as a Connecticut native, when it comes to UConn men’s college basketball, I tend to look right past this inconvenient truth. In other words, I’m a pretty big hypocrite.


Granted, I actually graduated from UConn Law, but I have plenty of friends whose only experience with the state university is a lost weekend at Storrs sometime in the late Nineties and that doesn’t stop them for shouting themselves hoarse when the Huskies are on television this time of year. And if I’m honest, I was a UConn hoops fan long before I made the mistake of going to law school, so I’m not any better. Really, I’m not a fan because I went to law school there; I’m a fan in spite of the fact that I went to law school there. It’s pathetic, I know, but you have to realize that as a kid growing up in The Constitution State during the late-Eighties, there wasn’t much going on. The Hartford Whalers were laughable, the Yankees, save Don Mattingly, irrelevant and the Internet nonesistent. If you were Gen-Xer without a driver’s license, you’re options were limited because, eventually, even Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! got old. And I don’t think the situation was too much rosier for adults. After all, much of Connecticut was a giant bedroom community marooned between New York City and Boston. On its own, the state was a cipher, affluent but anodyne, and in desperate need of a collective identity.

Enter the Huskies

Mercifully, that began to change a little more than 20 years ago during the 1989-90 “Dream Season,” a campaign that initiated one of the most dramatic and improbable transformations of a NCAA Division I athletic program in what we might call the “ESPN Era.” In honor of the program’s ascension and this current squad’s Final Four appearance, I’ve given some thought to my top 5 UConn men’s basketball memories, so, in chronological order, here’s what I’ve come up with:

1)     UConn 70 Georgetown 65 Big East Regular Season (January 20, 1990)—While UConn had won of NIT the preceding season, I had the feeling that most people figured that was a good as it was going to get. They were just satisfied that somebody from Connecticut had won something. The prospect of actually dislodging the real beasts of the Big East, like Georgetown, Syracuse, Villanova, St. John’s and even Seton Hall, simply wasn’t realistic. On this night, though, while watching this game with a group of classmates at a friend’s fourteenth birthday party, you could sense things might be beginning to change. We were all sitting there, just waiting for the Hoyas, who were undefeated and ranked second at the time, to make a run and overwhelm the unranked, upstart Huskies. They never did, and UConn celebrated a famous victory.

2)     UConn 71, Clemson 70 NCAA Tournament regional semifinal East Rutherford, N.J. (March 22, 1990)—A friend’s father had just dropped me off at home after basketball practice.  We had been listening on the radio, and I literally sprinted from the car to my parent’s door to make sure I didn’t miss anything. While I barged through the door, I asked my father what happened. “They lost,” he said, walking upstairs. I didn’t respond until I got in front of the screen. Then, relieved, I shouted “No, there’s still one second left.” He didn’t respond. Then I watched this happen:

I didn’t know how to react; I was as shocked as Elgin Campbell (2:16). Without taking my eyes off the screen, I just yelled, “They WON.”

3)     Duke 79, UConn 78 (OT) NCAA Tournament regional final East Rutherford, N.J. (March 24, 1990)—This time, it was a basketball game—rather than a practice—that kept me from watching most of this Elite Eight classic. Right around halftime of my game, somebody who had been listening to UConn in their car came into our middle school’s gymnasium and reported the score to someone sitting in the stands. Soon, the entire crowd was abuzz. Sensing the urgency of the situation, the referees suggested we take an impromptu time-out to try to catch the end of the game that really mattered. And so, all the sweaty players and most of the anxious crowd repaired to the school’s library, where someone had manipulated the rabbit ears on an old RCA so that CBS’s snowy picture gradually came into focus. As someone who had been watching (and hating) Duke since 1985, I just knew Christian Laettner and his floppy, pretty boy bowl cut were going to do this (at 2:18):

Cruelly, just like that, the Dream Season was over. I swore under my breath, and we went back to finish our game. I don’t remember who won; I don’t think too many people cared.

4)     UConn 75, Washington 74 NCAA Tournament regional semifinal Greensboro, N.C. (March , 1998)—My college friends (most of whom were not UConn fans) and I watched entirely too much college basketball, and all of us were sure that this talented UConn squad was going to win this match-up handily. Washington, though, just refused to go away, and, with 10 seconds left, somehow found themselves in the lead. Still, I was irrationally confident that UConn were going to find a way to win. That is, I felt that way until a Jake Voskul's shot rimmed out excruciatingly with 6 seconds left. What followed next was a communal experience that couldn’t have been more antithetical to the one Laettner inflicted upon me eight years earlier. Amid a hail of indignation and expletives, we watched Rip Hamilton chase down a rebound and do this:

A minute later, we were still going nuts and still swearing, but for an entirely different reason. I'm pretty sure people waste their time watching sports for moments like this.
  

5)   UConn 77, Duke 74 NCAA Tournament championship game St. Petersburg, Fla. (March 29, 1999)--The state of Connecticut couldn't have scripted a more satisfying way to win their first NCAA men's basketball championship. To do it in such dramatic fashion against a perennial angstgegner felt like a realization of the Dream Season Laettner deferred nine years earlier. While watching the wild celebration that accompanied the final buzzer, I couldn't help but think back to a night in January nine years before when a bunch of kids watched an unranked Uconn take down the mighty Hoyas.


Like any 20-year relationship, there's been some speed bumps in the state's love affair with this team, and, as recent NCAA sanctions suggest, UConn lost Cinderella's glass slipper long ago. Still, if Husky Nation tends to look the other way when the dark side of the program is revealed, I can sympathize. It's not right, but a state that was teased by the New England Patriots and betrayed by the Whalers is always going to give the program that has given them something to cheer about for over two decades a second chance.