There have been 30 seconds left on the cellular phone timer Sunday, counting right down to the exact second when the Lenovo Area hallway could be cleared. Not part of a staff or somebody operating this NCAA Match website? Time to go. Everybody strikes alongside. And that is when Dan Hurley emerged from a non-public room carrying a go well with jacket over a grey T-shirt. Occasion protocol was now irrelevant. This is able to be how time ran out: The Connecticut males’s basketball head coach, again towards a wall, staying longer than he was alleged to.
“Somebody was going to need to put us down on this event,” Hurley mentioned, once more, identical to he’d mentioned all weekend. “We weren’t going out like suckers on this one.”
This was the ending he believed his program earned the suitable to demand. These had been the directions written between the strains of the 2 nationwide championship banners hung after every of the previous two seasons. This March, everybody in the way in which would encounter a basketball staff and a bunch of Hemingway characters unexpectedly. Defeating UConn wouldn’t be sufficient, within the estimation of its coach, to turn into what UConn was. The Huskies must be destroyed.
So it went. A 77-75 loss to No. 1-seed Florida, and the top to the chase for a 3rd straight nationwide title, was measured in swallowed blood.
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No. 1 Florida halts UConn’s reign in ‘excruciating ending’ worthy of the two-time champs