Back then, which is not so far back then, people spoke of coach Jim Calhoun’s Huskies in a hoop dialect drastically different from nowadays: as the regular season mastodon that would quake in the brackets. People huffed as people do.

Calhoun’s first 12 Connecticut teams wandered into some excruciating fates: three Elite Eight losses, three Sweet Sixteen losses, a closing shot from Christian Laettner at the horn in overtime of the 1990 East Region final that brought Duke from down 78-77 to a 79-78 win, a dazzler of a 102-96 loss to UCLA in the 1995 West Region final despite 36 points from Ray Allen. By the time the Huskies finally sweated through this fresh No. 10-seeded upstart called “Gonzaga” by 67-62 in the 1999 West Region final in Phoenix, the Associated Press began thusly: “Finally, barely, Connecticut is in the Final Four.” It had done so beating “the little Jesuit school from Spokane, Wash.”

Calhoun got to the Final Four, spoke of “excitement, joy, happiness,” and committed poetry on the subject of losing in March Madness.

“When it ends, it doesn’t just slowly end,” he said then. “The curtain gets drawn down and the band marches on and you look up and it’s like a parade that just passed through and you’re kind of left to clean up. Emotionally, that’s how you feel.”

He had felt that a lot, and now 25 years later, there he was on the big screen Monday night in the Arizona Cardinals’ football stadium, beaming from the audience of 74,423 as actor Bill Murray kidded around and hovered over Calhoun, what with Murray’s son Luke a Connecticut assistant. By Monday night Calhoun had won three national titles, his former assistant Kevin Ollie had won one, and the current coach, Dan Hurley, two. Connecticut had become more than a familiar name; it had become a familiar empire aimed even higher: to some of the most virtuoso basketball yet played in the sport.

The 75-60 win over an outstanding Purdue hiked Connecticut’s all-time record in Final Four games to a celestial 12-1. In Final Fours strewn from St. Petersburg, Fla., to San Antonio, to Detroit, to Houston, to Dallas-Fort Worth, to Houston again and to Greater Phoenix, the Huskies have lost only in 2009 to Michigan State — in Detroit. Now when sixth-year coach Hurley speaks of pursuing a third straight title, people nod at the rationale.

“Yeah, we’ll enjoy this for a couple of days,” he said Monday night. “On the flight home tomorrow, we’ll start talking about what the roster’s going to look like. Obviously we graduate some players. We’re going to lose a couple potentially to the NBA early entry. We’re going to dive in and put together a roster that can play a comparable level of basketball to the one you guys have witnessed the last two years. That’s what I know our mind-set will be. We’re going to be focusing on trying to put together a three-year run, not just a two-year run.”

When Calhoun took over at Connecticut in 1986, it did not appear on the little maps that lie on the brains of college basketball fans. It had known seven tournaments in the 1950s under Hugh Greer, an Elite Eight in 1964 under Fred Shabel — it lost, 101-54, to Duke — a Sweet Sixteen in 1976 under Dee Rowe — it lost, 93-79, to Rutgers. The snobs of elsewhere tended to think of Connecticut as a regional matter.

Then Calhoun started winning and winning, with six Big East titles in the 1990s, but also became yet another of those great coaches who take a while rummaging around for the keys to the Final Four. (Purdue’s Matt Painter would be the latest, qualifying in this, his 19th season.) He had a 32-2 team in 1996 that lost a Sweet 16 game to a very good No. 5 seed Mississippi State, for one thing. He had another 32-2 team when he got to St. Petersburg for the 1999 Final Four, with nowhere near the hype of the 36-1 Duke team also present that weekend.

“Clearly, far and away they’re the best basketball team in college basketball,” Calhoun said on the Sunday between games.

If the records shouted an even match, the people shouted a Duke coronation.

Of course, Connecticut won that stirring final, 77-74, with Khalid El-Amin all full of character, Ricky Moore defending like there were two of him out there, and Richard Hamilton scoring 27 points. Of course, a security guard really did mistake the 5-foot-10 El-Amin for a trespassing fan during the celebration afterward. “That really did happen,” El-Amin said that night, and, “He was trying to escort me off the court.”

They got that sorted, and in The Washington Post, C. Jemal Horton wrote that the Huskies had done “what few thought they could” while “relieving Coach Jim Calhoun of the reputation of a great coach who never won a title.” Said El-Amin: “I think the Duke fans couldn’t believe it. I looked into their section and they just looked like they were shocked.”

Now, titles have whooshed forward in 2004 (with Emeka Okafor’s fabulous team), 2011 (with Kemba Walker shepherding a team that finished ninth in the Big East at 9-9), 2014 (as a vastly overlooked No. 7 seed), 2023 and 2024. “It’s so hard to win a national championship,” sophomore Alex Karaban said at his locker Monday night, but is it? It is, but Connecticut has become the first repeat champion since Florida in 2007, and it has done it by strafing two tournaments and 12 tournament games while never winning by fewer than 13. It lost three vital starters from the 2023 champion, and then Hurley and his staff welcomed Stephon Castle, a freshman from Georgia, and Cam Spencer, a transfer from Rutgers.

Now its latest season ended with Hurley on another interview dais saying, “Yeah, I mean, s—, we’re going to try to replicate it again. We’re going to maintain a championship culture. We’re bringing in some very talented high school freshmen. Our returning players, through player development, will take a big jump. We’ll strategically add through the portal. I don’t think we’re going anywhere.”

And it ended with a blob of reporters out in the hallway listening to and learning from Hurley, a former nine-season coach at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark (2001-10, before he went to Wagner and Rhode Island), the son of a Hall of Fame high school coach, the brother of that fellow college coach, Arizona State’s Bobby Hurley, who played point guard for Duke when it haunted Connecticut in 1990 when Connecticut meant something different. Now Dan Hurley was the one snaring title No. 6 and saying of Calhoun: “I’d be the biggest idiot in the world not to embrace him, learn everything from him. He built this thing. He’s the patriarch.”