IT’S ALIVE!!!! Crowd at XL showed signs of life Saturday, can it carry over?

Rodney Purvis's dunk got the XL crowd on its feet.
Rodney Purvis’s dunk got the XL crowd on its feet | Stephen Slade

The familiar “UConn!” “Huskies!” call-and-response carried over the crowd exiting the XL Saturday after the UConn men defeated former Big East conference foe Georgetown.

“It’s been awhile since we’ve heard the ‘UConn’ cheer in the tunnel,” Alex, our podcast producer and holder of dope seats for UConn games noted as we joined the ecstatic crowd.

It has been awhile, too long really, since the XL Center, and even Gampel for that matter, has felt that electric before, during and after a UConn game.

Other than the last two games of the AAC tournament, I’m hard pressed to think of a game in which the crowd actually spent any time up out of its seats. Saturday at the XL felt like we’d gone back in time. Back to when we played conference games against teams we had real rivalries with. Games against teams with whom we’d had historic battles.

In the opening hype video in which the game was billed as a “Clash of the Titans” (side note, UConn athletics hype video game is on fire right now), we saw Ray Allen’s Big East Championship shot. Photos of Ewing and Iverson, John Thompson II. Those are people we know. Those are games we remember.

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Even with an impending (and, in some part of the state and in CT South, excuse me, NYC, very active) snow storm, the stands were almost entirely full. I suspect it’s because when the schedule got announced, this was the game people circled on their calendars. Even though we’ll face some better-ranked opponents during our conference schedule, just the name Georgetown brings back so many great basketball memories. We know Georgetown. They’re our rival. We know how to get up for a game against them. And we did.

UConn played a nationally televised game that was fun and exciting in front of a raucous crowd. That sentence shouldn’t be an anomaly. But it is.

When there’s a game against Georgetown on the schedule, it makes it harder to get excited about games against ECU or Tulane or a Directional Florida University. I get it. We don’t know them. They’re not our rivals. And in the Land of Steady Habits, we do not take well to change.

But the fact is, at least for now, this is our conference. And while hearing that UConn is planning to schedule games against Syracuse and potentially other former conference rivals is great, we still need to support the team against their actual conference opponents.

And it’s not like the entire AAC is hot garbage. Temple, Memphis, Cincinnati and SMU are all legitimate basketball programs, some with real histories. While we can (and should, and to a degree UConn is) schedule quality out-of-conference games we can get excited for, we should also be able to get up for games against real basketball teams.

On Thursday, the men’s team takes on Cincinnati at the XL at 7 p.m., in a game that will be televised on ESPN. That is a real game, against a real team that has real consequences for UConn’s postseason fate. There’s no snowstorm in the forecast. This is a game that should sell out. At present, however, that are still thousands of unsold tickets. If you can make it to a game in a snowstorm, you can make it to this one. And hopefully, when the game ends Saturday, the “UConn” cheer will be echoing through the tunnels of the XL again.

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