The UConn Huskies won their third men's NCAA basketball title defeating Butler by a score of 53-41 in Houston last night.
UConn, a team to be forever treasured from Greenwich to Thompson and Salisbury to Stonington, defeated Butler 53-41 before 70,376 to secure its third national title in 13 years. The legacy of coach Jim Calhoun, now one of five coaches to win three or more championships, shot into the stratosphere with other legends, and the program he essentially built from scratch between the rolling hills of Storrs has again climbed the NCAA mountain.
It was a low scoring affair that featured tenacious defense combined with abysmal shooting. Butler set a championship record for inefficiency, going 18.8 percent from the floor. It might have been the place not the teams that accounted for it. For Butler it was as if there was a lid on the basket. Nothing fell for them. For UConn it was their second game in a row where they scored a season low point total.
But they won anyway, and in the end there was a third Huskies title. During the few undergrad semesters that I spent at UConn in the mid 60s nobody would have dreamed such a thing.
HOUSTON — In one of those simple, brilliant leads that occasionally grace the sports pages, Courant beat writer Michael Arace sent 17 words back to Connecticut from St. Petersburg, Fla., on March 29, 1999.
"The UConn Huskies won the national championship Monday night. There. It has been written in your lifetime."
The 17 words were 98 years in the making, of course, yet they concisely captured the sweeping nature of a most unlikely achievement.
Well, there it is. It's been written three times now.
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