You're a pragmatist, and also one of only a couple dozen or so who have been here longer than me. Think of it this way:
Would you, after all this time, want to spend all message board time among the likes of "soft as Duke" Deepster or that idiot Dove? Especially since we've now added a bull rush of frontrunning bandwagoners this year to that aforementioned braintrust ? We've lost our edge. We are fat and complacent, and the ones who aren't are entitled know nothing noobs who puff their chests based on the last year with no prior sweat equity. Sometimes it is needed to remind oneself what it is like to be hungry, to see how a season of a team with little to no tournament success, but a feisty, passionate fan base, navigates the message board world.
The boneyard is like Rocky Balboa in Rocky 3, getting fat and happy and then getting his ass kicked by Clubber Lang. Think of me as Apollo Creed taking Rocky back to his hard roots.
I realize that I'm recasting your offered self-conception, but I see this season for you as having been more like a visiting professorship.
You weren't on sabbatical, you maintained your primary affiliation, and seemed to have continued your work in a new setting.
In such recognized instances, one doesn't have to get involved in administrative details, committee meetings, or department politics. Those things can be boring time sucks and merry-go-rounds of interminable pettiness.
If you set it up right, maybe you have more time to be with family at a time when - no matter what magic the home team is up to - there's something on the home front that's irrefutably more meaningful, and quite certainly temporal.
The time in a new space isn't necessarily about breaking new ground, or plying your same old same old in a conventionally more exotic locale, but it's still special.
I imagine that you've represented your home institution in good faith and with a generous spirit, to the benefit of others, without a shrinking fear that you might be giving away the good stuff in a disloyal or dangerous way.
You already know the UConn fanbase travels well; your actions have expanded the definition of that term. I wander Kentuckiana in UConn gear, and (so far) people are friendly, polite, and complimentary ("bless my heart").
A quarter century ago, I witnessed similar temporary exchanges, as high-performance faculty criss-crossed from one side of Washington Square Park to the other for a semester or a year, but never for a full-scale switch.
I don't think The Boneyard is necessarily as insufferable as you and some other long-timers might sometimes find it, but I can understand the mindframe.
I've been registered, logged in, and engaged at various depths since summer of 1999, after a bunch of years on dial-up AOL.
I got to this version of the yard in the 4th week of August 2011, and I'm well aware that there's a good bunch of folks who aren't so enamored with such a pedigree. They're neither wrong nor right, nor are those who feel the opposite.
Throughout, I've stayed a nobody of sorts, at least in relation to the 'cool kids' and gatekeepers, but it's just plain vanilla facts that I was in the Field House going back to 1961-62, so that adds up to nearly 3 decades before the Dream Season, and nearly 4 decades before a National Championship, which my season ticket-holder dad never experienced.
Some of the scorekeeping here is on par with our current day nemesis "Karen" looking for the manager to register a complaint with whose in charge, except it's more like the manager trying to continually assert, "I'm in charge" in an ever-changing world where the center won't hold, nobody's in charge, and arrangements are so fractured and temporary and bewildering that two teams from California will be joining the Atlantic Coast Conference next year, along with one from Texas (at least that's what I think it is).
"Indifference" is more recently being offered as "the opposite of love," or at least posited as being more harmful than hate, so I don't want to make too much light of being Ignored. But that's just my orientation against unsustainable self-certainty, overreaching, and hubris. I'll just say that, while I could be wrong, being Ignored doesn't seem like the worst thing to receive as a threat. It's probably worse to be feeling like that's all you've got when there's really a big old wonderful world of all kinds of folks to celebrate Huskymania with...even if it's more than 90% bettable that nobody's gonna read this.
Less than 72 hours until tip-off, eh?
Go Huskies!