I said this would be later.

UConn has its game notes out (PDF). Looking at it, the thing that stands out and makes me most jealous as a Pitt fan out of the Pittsburgh market — the number of national TV games. This is the reward for being a consistent top team in the country for a number of years: 9 games on ESPN/ESPN2 and 5 games on CBS and ABC. That’s the kind of national exposure that helps perpetuate the talent levels. Hey, I’d rather see them on TV than any more Duke and UNC.

The Hartford Courant has a notebook piece focusing on Denham Brown and his knee. In another notebook piece from the Connecticut Post there is a good passage about the rivalry with Pitt and the context.

So is Pittsburgh UConn’s No. 1 rival these days?

“No, I think Syracuse is,” Calhoun said flatly.

After his denial, however, Calhoun pointed to the magnitude the game has taken on in recent years.

“I was talking to a friend in Pittsburgh and he thinks from the game in which Khalid (El-Amin) came back and scored five points in the last 30 seconds to win the game and things were thrown and so on, it was just a heart-breaking loss for Pittsburgh,” the coach said of UConn’s 70-69 win at Fitzgerald Field House Dec. 12, 1998. “And it was an exhilarating win for us on the way to a national championship.”

That game, Calhoun says, made the Pitt players and fans hungry to get back at UConn.

“Since that time, Pittsburgh has felt the team it wants to beat is Connecticut,” Calhoun said. “And the fact that Pittsburgh beat us twice last year, clearly they’re a team we want to beat.”

UConn beat Pittsburgh 68-65 earlier this year in Hartford.

“So I would say that this season they are our greatest rival,” Calhoun said. “But I would still put Syracuse, over the last 10 or 12 years, as our biggest rival.”

First, it isn’t an insult to say the ‘Cuse are the biggest rivals of any team in the Big East. Syracuse has been on top in the Big East from day one. Everyone in the Big East wants to beat Syracuse. They’ve been here longer, and they’ve been on top the longest.

Next to the painful subject of that game at Fitzgerald. That was the last game I attended at Fitzgerald. Pat had gotten tickets invited me to come for the game. We went from the ecstasy of looking like Pitt was blowing them off the court to the agony of watching Pitt blow that game. That was the game that guaranteed that Ralph Willard wasn’t coming back. He never recovered from that game. Weeks later, after a Pitt loss, he would somehow bring that game up in the context of the team still working it through.

So, when I read this column on how Pitt is the big rivalry game with UConn, this passage didn’t ring true.

The rivalry was conceived before Pitt became a contender. The date was Dec. 12, 1998, and UConn’s Khalid El-Amin was being pelted with plastic bottles as he danced on the scorer’s table. El-Amin had just drained a buzzer-beating runner in the lane to give the Huskies a 70-69 victory at Fitzgerald, its first signature win during the national championship campaign.

Now of all the things that rained down on El-Amin — most of them were boos and insults (regrettably, some were of a racial nature — no excuse for that). Plastic bottles were not pelting him. That’s revisionist crap. Some bottles were thrown on the court, but if they were thrown at him, they were poorly aimed.

This article focuses on Pitt’s homecourt advantage, and quotes from Ben Howland.

It’s going to be a tough, physical game. That is really the only thing everyone can be sure of.

Sports Illustrated lists it as the marquee matchup and in its breakdown of the game, picks UConn. The pick to UConn seems to be decided on a nod to Calhoun’s history and coaching. He clearly has the advantage in track record, and so you have to give him the benefit of the doubt with coaching right now.

I can’t pick this game, because I can’t separate my heart from my head on this one.