The gestures were familiar for Dan Hurley.
The hands behind the back. The arms crossed. Some facetious clapping. Occasionally turning his back to the action and silently muttering curse words. The shrugging, with occasional arms flailing in disgust. The death stares at officials after a foul call and the side conversations during timeouts to express the same sentiment.
It was classic Hurley, the coach who has ruled the NCAA men’s basketball tournament the past two years like a king in his castle. This is March, and it has been his, and the UConn Huskies’, month.
Key word though, has.
That version of UConn is no more, certainly not right now after scraping by the Oklahoma Sooners, 67–59, on Friday night in a game that more closely resembled a rock fight for long stretches. It was the 13th straight tournament win for the Huskies, tying the Duke Blue Devils for the second-longest streak all-time, but it was the first by single digits and vastly different from the preceding dozen.
“It was a microcosm of the season,” Hurley said afterward. “Whenever we’ve been able to start playing good basketball and getting separation, we’ve tended to shoot ourselves in the foot. But the thing about this team is we’re really battle-tested, and we’ve had to fight so hard all year that we showed a lot of toughness down the stretch to execute some things and make some critical shots and make some critical stops.
“But there was a lot of suffering going on.”
There was hope, among outsiders and insiders to the program all the same, that this wouldn't be the case and a magical time on the calendar would be able to rekindle some of the magic of those past two runs. Never mind the struggles over the course of the season. Never mind being shipped to Raleigh as the No. 8 seed in the West Region, with the back-to-back defending national champions looking at a difficult path to even make it to the second weekend of the tournament.
Forget all of that, this was the time where the lights shined the brightest in the sport. This was where UConn earned a reputation across college hoops that cemented the program as a modern blueblood. The team that won every tourney game by at least 13 points last season.
There were flashes of that version early on and, even, in the dying embers. UConn opened 5-of-6 to start the game, jumping out to an 11–6 lead in the first five minutes.
The shots were falling. The ball movement was crisp and the looks were open. That trademark defense which was always the team’s hallmark, you could see some of that against the Sooners, who had multiple stretches of five-plus minutes without hitting a shot from the field. OU hit just one basket in the final 10 minutes of the first half and committed four turnovers in the first five minutes of the second half.
“I thought we played hard possession by possession even when we were missing shots,” Oklahoma coach Porter Moser said. “We had some good looks.”
“We knew we really had to guard today,” said a reserved Hurley. “They’re obviously a top-20 offense in the country. [Jeremiah Fears] was everything that we thought he was going to be out on the court.”
Perhaps nothing encapsulated the difference in what UConn was this season compared to the previous two than their effort against the Sooners guard. Though the Huskies had decent team defense—OU shot just 32% for the game—they allowed Fears to do basically whatever he pleased, looking like a blur every time the freshman from Joliet, Ill., touched the ball and came downhill.
Fears smoothly drove the lane with ease and pulled up for a jumper without so much of a hand in his face consistently in the midrange. He notched 11 points before halftime when nobody else in the game had more than five and, when UConn started to adjust down the stretch, continually found open options in dishing four assists or scoring through traffic to eventually finish with a game-high 20 points.
“We wanted to win this game, that’s what matters,” said Fears, who declined to say if he was returning to school next season or if he was considering declaring for the NBA draft. “I was trying to do whatever to help this team win.”
It was a one-man show for Oklahoma, a breakout game on the national stage for Fears in carrying his team when not much else was going well for them. He was far from a household name coming in after the team scraped into the field amid an up-and-down inaugural campaign in the SEC, but he could well be the player who stood out most in the first week of the dance even with a one-and-done appearance.
It sure wasn’t for any lack of effort, with Fears and his teammates continually fighting to eventually grab the lead with 9:03 left. That prompted plenty of fans to start chanting in support after UConn trailed in the second half for the first time in two years. The crowd, with enough Florida Gators fans milling around from the earlier game who didn’t quite voice support for their new conference rivals, was decidedly still in favor of the Huskies.
It wasn’t Storrs South, but it was close enough for a neutral site as thousands of the faithful flocked to the Triangle to see if the team could rediscover what had made the program a dynasty the last two years each March.
What they wound up witnessing was far from any kind of revival, but rather a red flag in doing just enough to get by in the end with some timely shooting and a late dagger from veteran Alex Karaban to finally breathe a sigh of relief.
“I saw Fears closing out late, so I decided to take it,” said Karaban, who was 5-of-11 from the field with 13 points. “I passed one up in the corner, and I should have shot that one, too, and I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. I just saw it and just had to let it fly.”
Up next lies the West’s No. 1 seed. Florida dispatched the Norfolk State Spartans, 95–69, a few hours earlier, living up to its high billing early before coasting in its opening game.
The SEC tournament champions are, by most oddsmakers, one of the tournament favorites and look very much like the team that won the past two trophies; Hurley even acknowledged some of the similarities, especially with their fearsome frontcourt. Opposite number Todd Golden saw his team get back nearly two-thirds of their missed shots and led by over 30 for long stretches against the No. 16 seed, all despite not really playing all that crisply in the second half.
If the Gators play even halfway decent, Sunday’s second-round game at the Lenovo Center will feel less like a passing of the torch in the tourney and more like a funeral.
That’s not a position Hurley and the Huskies are all that familiar with. If they keep playing like they did against Oklahoma—like they have most of this season, to be fair—then they might have to just sit there and take it.
“When you play teams at this level, which is the best of the best in the world, the windows are tighter,” Hurley said. “Just to be able to come here and, No. 1, to make the tournament and fight our way in, come out here and fight with some honor and get ourselves an opportunity to play one of the best teams in the country, that reminds me some of what we put on the floor in Florida, but there’s a lot of honor in us being able to face the last team that went back to back.
“I think there’s honor in fighting and getting to the round of 32 and making somebody put you down in this tournament to end this run we’ve been on. The run we’ve been on—you know, if it wasn’t for all of my antics and viral moments, obviously there would be more focus on just what we’ve accomplished as a program the last three years. It’s been an amazing run, one of the best runs anyone’s had.”
There is plenty of truth in that statement, just like there’s plenty of truth in UConn no longer looking like the behemoth they’ve been.
Eventually, likely as soon as Sunday afternoon, that will result in the most unfamiliar of things for the Huskies at this time of year—when the winning is officially referred to in the past tense.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as UConn Survives, But These Aren’t the Same March Huskies.