Terps men’s basketball columnist

It was Dec. 29, 2007, and I was visiting family in Littleton, Colo. My parents, sister, aunts, uncles and cousins had all met up that morning to spend just a little more time together, getting breakfast and heading to the bowling alley before our flight home the next day.

But I wasn’t with them.

I was in my grandparents’ basement — by myself — watching Connecticut take on Wake Forest in the Meineke Car Care Bowl.

On the surface, it seems a bit absurd. Why was I so invested in watching a 9-3 Huskies team play a middling ACC program? More importantly, why would I skip a day with family I only see once a year to sit alone in a basement and watch a seemingly insignificant bowl game?

Because UConn football mattered to me.

I grew up in Connecticut, a state where the only professional team is the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun. Yes, the NFL’s New England Patriots nearly built a stadium in Connecticut in 1998. And yes, the NHL’s Hartford Whalers once called our state capital home. But the Patriots chose Foxboro, Mass., and the Whalers moved to North Carolina in 1997. Sadly, the Sun are all we have.

Most of the state’s sports fans take their allegiances south to New York or north to Boston. Connecticut residents support the Yankees, Giants, Jets, Mets, Red Sox, Patriots and everything in between — even though none of us can truly call any of those teams our own.

The only team we can call our own is the Huskies. Which we do. Often. UConn matters to us Nutmeggers. It’s the closest thing we have to a professional team in the four major sports, and everyone grows up a fan.

It started on the hardwood with Jim Calhoun and Geno Auriemma. The Huskies men’s and women’s basketball coaches managed to build national powerhouses in rural Storrs, Conn., making 42 NCAA Tournament appearances since 1989 and winning a combined 10 national championships since 1995.

Football, though, was an afterthought. The Huskies were nothing more than a moderately successful Division I-AA team playing in a 16,200-seat stadium 26 miles east of Hartford. They had little history and no fanfare.

Randy Edsall changed all that. UConn hired him in 1999 and watched him transition the program into a Division 1-A school in just three years. He got the Huskies a new stadium — the 40,000-seat Rentschler Field — in 2003, got them into the Big East in 2004 and led them to their first ever bowl win  — a 39-10 shellacking of Toledo in the Motor City Bowl — the same year.

Edsall gave the entire state a reason to watch, a reason to care. Basketball was still king, but football wasn’t so far behind anymore. They weren’t Ohio State or Michigan, but they were good enough to make us tune in every Saturday.

I know I did. I followed them all throughout their FBS rise. I watched when quarterback Dan Orlovsky led UConn to its first ever Division I winning record in 2003. I watched when running back Donald Brown rushed for an NCAA-leading 2,083 yards in 2008 and led the Huskies to an International Bowl victory. And I watched when Edsall coached them all the way to a Big East title and a Fiesta Bowl appearance in 2010.

And when he left UConn to join to take over the Terrapins football team following that season? I was ecstatic. He built a respected program in a state whose recruiting grounds are as fertile as the Sahara Desert. There’s no reason why he can’t find even more success in this talent-rich state.

And if he finally does, Terps fans will begin to care again. The win totals might be low and attendance might be down, but Edsall has created more out of less before.

I dropped everything to watch the Huskies lose a dull bowl game, 24-10, to an unexciting Demon Deacons team in 2007. And five years later, I’m still watching Edsall.

“The state of Connecticut — and the University of Connecticut — is a really special place for me,” Edsall said Tuesday. “I’ll always be indebted to the people from the state of Connecticut.”

The people of Connecticut are indebted to him, too. Someday, maybe Terps fans will be as well.

vitale@umdbk.com