UConn's Last, Short-handed Win over Indiana Was Emotional for Jim Calhoun

Greetings from Day 2 in NYC for the 2K Sports Classic. UConn faces Indiana and former recruiting target Noah Vonleh tonight. The game won't likely start until about 7:30 p.m.

UConn last faced Indiana on Jan. 26, 2008, a 68-63 victory at Assembly Hall that actually nearly brought Jim Calhoun to tears. The Huskies were down two key players (Jerome Dyson and Doug Wiggins) who were suspended after having been arrested a night or two earlier for underage drinking, but still pulled out a gutsy victory.

Wiggins returned soon after, but Dyson allegedly flunked a drug test and was gone for another month. I'll never forget when Calhoun & Co. walked into the team hotel to meet with the media the night before, we were informed that there were "no legalities involved" with Dyson and Wiggins.

Well ...

Still, it was a stirring victory, one that really had you start believing the Huskies could be better than expected that season. They wound up returning to the NCAA tournament after a one-year absence, though got bopped in the first round by San Diego.

UConn had lost to the Hoosiers the prior season, 77-73 in Hartford. I wasn't on the beat yet, but I'm told Calhoun was in rare form after that loss.

The Huskies are 5-3 all-time against Indiana.

*** In today's JV game, Washington squares off against BC. Washington features Mike Anderson, a Hartford native. Anderson, a 6-foot-4 junior guard, was an all-league player at Weaver High in 2009. He subsequently played at Taag Academy in Tampa in 2010, spent a year red-shirting at Iowa Western CC, transferred to Lincoln Trail College in Illinois before ending up at Moberly C.C. in Missouri. At Moberly last year, he averaged 17.2 points and 10 rebounds per game and was the No. 47 JUCO player in the country, according to jucorecruiting.com.

Anderson will get the chance to play his hometown team on Dec. 22, when UConn heads out to Seattle to face Washington in a battle of Huskies.