There were 30 seconds left on the cell phone timer Sunday, counting down to the precise moment when the Lenovo Arena hallway would be cleared. Not a part of a team or someone running this NCAA Tournament site? Time to go. Everyone moves along. And this is when Dan Hurley emerged from a private room wearing a suit jacket over a gray T-shirt. Event protocol was now irrelevant. This would be how time ran out: The Connecticut men’s basketball head coach, back against a wall, staying longer than he was supposed to.
“Someone was going to have to put us down in this tournament,” Hurley said, again, just like he’d said all weekend. “We were not going out like suckers in this one.”
This was the ending he believed his program earned the right to demand. These were the instructions written between the lines of the two national championship banners hung after each of the past two seasons. This March, everyone in the way would encounter a basketball team and a bunch of Hemingway characters all at once. Defeating UConn would not be enough, in the estimation of its coach, to become what UConn was. The Huskies would have to be destroyed.
So it went. A 77-75 loss to No. 1-seed Florida, and the end to the chase for a third straight national title, was measured in swallowed blood.
Read more on this thrilling game below.
No. 1 Florida halts UConn’s reign in ‘excruciating ending’ worthy of the two-time champs
