Little drunk here - sorry. Been drinking too much recently.
What it really amounts to, when you attempt to add it all up, is that it doesn't all add up. The French would call it "zhuh nuh suh kwah". That's phonetic, because I write French about as well as I write Clingan, which is to say, not at all (loved the Frasier episode where he reads the thing in Clingan thinking it's Hebrew).
And, really, at the end of the day, that's why UConn is so awesome. We have never had, nor are we likely to ever have, the number 1 recruiting class. Or the top number of MAAs. Or any other G---- D--- metric of what is supposed to make a team great.
But at the end of the day, our boys get it done. With barely a stat (free throw %?) to back them, they get it done. And that, really, is the glory of it all, isn't it? It's that we routinely pull it out of our @ss and ram it up theirs when it matters. And when it's all over, and the confetti has stopped falling. And the last "ONIONS!" has been enunciated, we get the gear. And we take it back to Storrs. And 300 hundred something other schools look and spit out words like "fluke" and "weak field" and other palliatives, as they lick their wounds and attempt - vainly - to figure out how the hell we did it.
And the greatest image of the tournament, after the images of UConn players celebrating the win and Ollie emitting the primal scream, is the UK players walking solemnly off the court, and Coach Cal mouthing something about "they're only 18," when you know the concerted thought running through their heads is, "how the hell did they just win that?"
And the answer is that nobody really has the answer. Did anybody pick us? The answer is - we get it done, adversely to all of the available information. The Statistics.
And that's really the beauty of being a UConn fan - with the possible exception of 2004, we get it done when we're not expected to get it done, and that makes the NCs sweeter than they could have otherwise been.
I am really, really hopped up to see what 2015 brings. What an enjoyable group of kids. What a great program. We make the tourni - we're a threat. Simple as that. As much as they hate it. There isn't a single team in the field of 60 whatever that wants to see UConn in their bracket.
That's what we've become.
