Few teams — maybe no teams — scheduled as aggressively for the nonconference portion of their schedule this season like UConn.
After the turbulent, high-profile failure from last season — when the Huskies fell well short of being Final Four material, let alone winning a third straight national title — Dan Hurley leaned into the obstacles. It would’ve been understandable if the Huskies merely scheduled competitively.
But look at what’s still to come.
They scheduled like they wanted to atone for bad behavior.
On Saturday night, they played like it — for the most part.
The six-pack of notable high-majors Hurley’s third-ranked program has on the docket over the next four weeks began on Saturday, with the highly hyped top-10 matchup against No. 7 BYU in Boston at TD Garden. No. 3 Connecticut won 86-84, staving off a collapse after leading by as many as 20 points in the second half against a shorthanded Cougars team that opened the game down one starter and soon lost another.
What felt like a trending Connecticut runaway through the first 25 minutes of gameplay turned into a teeth-clenching save of a victory against a dangerous offense and one of the most talented players in college basketball, Cougars freshman AJ Dybantsa, a possible top pick in the NBA Draft
BYU made UConn earn it in the final five minutes. Hurley doesn’t like to finish that close, but he also can take satisfaction that this team can pull out a win like this. His group last season blew a few games of this ilk. It wasn’t beautiful, but it was a win.
It was different than how this probably would have gone a season ago.
Credit to Dybantsa, who scored 21 of his game-high 25 points in the second half, with more than half of those points coming in eyebrow-raising fashion. Dybantsa played his first of what will be an untold number of games in an NBA uniform TD Garden. Had he brought BYU all the way back, it would have…
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