Tourney fever spreads across USA

My friend Cherie Watts of Torrington is 86 years old and the ultimate UConn women’s basketball fan. She is a former East Windsor resident whose late husband Bob was once that town’s First Selectman. She likes Kevin Ollie’s UConn men’s team too, but not with the passion she has for the women’s team.

Whenever either team is on television, of course, she’s all over it. She is the typical UConn women’s hoops fan.

Every morning after breakfast, Cherie makes a bee-line for the “living room’’ right across the hall from the elegant dining room at Brookdale Litchfield

Hills. There she scours the newspapers for all the latest news on UConn. At lunch time, she fills in her table companions on whatever it may have been that she read that morning.

Like the rest of us with an interest in the team, she thinks Hall of Famer Geno Auriemma may be doing his best-ever coaching job this year. That’s saying a lot, since the team and Geno will be aiming for a 12th national championship during the current version of The Madness.

There were a couple of vague threats to the Lady Huskies’ winning streak this season, and one or two genuinely close calls, but it doesn’t appear to these old eyes that any other team in the tournament field has the talent, smarts or muscle to stop them and end their streak, which currently stands at 107 games.

The Hartford Courant, my former employer, is asking its readers to select, from among the former champions, the best UConn championship team of all. It’s an impossible job but fun to do because we all have personal preferences. Last Sunday, the paper devoted 1 ½ pages to reviewing each title team from 1994-95 to 2015-16.

While I have enjoyed all 11 of them, the first, ’94-95, is most memorable for me because it was the one I witnessed and wrote about from start to blockbuster finish. It occurred at the Target Center in Minneapolis and one of the things I remember most vividly about it was that more than 18,000 fans paid their way in to see it. That made a believer, in the women’s game, out of me.

Obviously, basketball played by women will never reach the heights that basketball played by men has long since reached. It is simply a different game. I believe anyone who has given the subject serious thought will agree. The men’s game, country wide, is far more popular. That is the reason that, as successful as Auriemma has been, his salary is still less than Ollie’s.

Geno labors in a basketball dream world because his teams almost invariably prove that they are a cut above opponents by winning most games by 30 or 40 points. Until their rivals can consistently reach the caliber of the Huskies, interest will never reach its zenith.

But it is nonetheless a terrific game that has made enormous strides, especially in Connecticut. The UConn women keep proving their popularity, game after game, year after year. In a state that has little to boast about, because of state government greed and poor management, they are important as a point of pride not simply as a superior basketball team.

It was Coach Jim Calhoun who started it all, and UConn fans and the university itself owes him plenty. Ollie has carried it forward, this poor season record-wise, notwithstanding. Calhoun should never be forgotten for it was he who put UConn on the college basketball map and won his way into the Hall of Fame while he was at it.