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There’s a reason only two men’s college basketball teams have repeated as national champions since the end of John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty in the 1970s. “It’s really, really, really hard to do,” says former Florida coach Billy Donovan, the last to achieve that feat in 2006 and 2007. The extreme degree of difficulty might also be why Dan Hurley and Connecticut are so perfectly wired for the pursuit.

“The bigness of what you’re trying to do,” Hurley says, “is intoxicating.”

His Huskies rampaged through the regular season, ripped through the Big East tournament and thrashed their first four NCAA Tournament opponents. They now sit two wins away from joining Donovan’s Gators and Mike Krzyzewski’s 1991-92 Duke as the third back-to-back champs in the modern era, in part because Hurley was never going to be happy with just the one. In fact, when he called Donovan, an old friend now coaching the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, soon after winning last year’s title, it wasn’t in search of the how-to handbook for repeating.

“I crashed emotionally,” Hurley says. “It didn’t feel as great as I thought. The pursuit felt better than the accomplishment. The pursuit is what’s addictive. Being part of a group that’s pursuing is addictive. I just didn’t like the s— as much as I thought I would, the victory lap. What you discover is you love the f—ing work more than you love staring at a banner or cutting down a net. When that stuff ends, you’re saying, ‘Where’s the mission?’”

He called Donovan because he needed to hear that he wasn’t crazy for feeling this way.

“I told him I’d gone through the same,” Donovan says. “I don’t want to say depression — that’s the wrong word — but there is this melancholy of, like, ‘What is my purpose? I wanted to get to this point, I got there, and now what?’

“I always go back to a ’60 Minutes’ interview with Tom Brady, after he won his third Super Bowl, when he was like, ‘Is this all there is?’ It’s really hard to find somebody that you can talk to, that’s been through it, that can understand what it’s like after. Because when the confetti stops falling and the parade is over, you’re left sitting there going, ‘What am I supposed to do next?’”

For men like Hurley and Donovan, whose father and father figures, respectively, were Naismith Hall of Fame coaches Bob Hurley Sr. and Rick Pitino, the next step is simple: chase another championship. Whether you actually capture it is not really the point.

“You learn a lot about yourself in the chase,” Donovan says. “You learn why you’re really doing this. What I learned was when you’re part of something greater than yourself — or even if you’re just trying to achieve something great — you can’t do it by yourself. When you understand the level of commitment and sacrifice that goes into that, if you apply that to your marriage, to your kids, to your relationships, you make the people around you better, and you make yourself better.”

So after the post-championship blues wore off and the thrill of trying to make history started to kick in, Hurley got back on the phone with Donovan. He wanted to know if there were any secrets to repeating — and what storms were coming, because he suspected defending a title would be far trickier than winning that first one. For an extra challenge, Hurley would be trying to do it despite losing five of his top seven players, including three NBA Draft picks, off the 2023 championship team. Donovan had the unprecedented luxury of returning his top seven players, including eventual top-10 picks Al Horford, Corey Brewer and Joakim Noah.

There was a built-in chemistry for those Gators, an unspoken selflessness.

“Everybody says to me all the time, ‘Man, how’d you get those guys to come back? They were all lottery picks.’” Donovan says. “You know why they came back? They came back because they didn’t want to leave (fellow starter) Taurean Green behind, because he wasn’t going to get drafted after that first championship. They came back because they wanted to help him in his career. That’s why we won. That’s it right there. Those guys had a level of sacrifice for one another that three of them would bypass millions and millions of dollars for a teammate.”

Hurley didn’t have that level of brotherhood baked into his roster, but he didn’t exactly start from scratch either. He had a four-man nucleus of legitimate contributors from the title team — Tristen Newton, Alex Karaban, Donovan Clingan and Hassan Diarra — and he plugged holes with very high-end talent: coveted transfer Cam Spencer, five-star freshman Stephon Castle and two more top-50 recruits. There would be plenty of good pieces, so the only question was how well they’d fit.

Perfectly, as it turns out.

“We just have people that are desperate to win more,” Hurley says. “We have ‘we’ guys. We have also talked about legacy. These guys right now are leaving a legacy in a place that’s hard to leave a legacy. It’s been a historical season in a tough place to make history. They’re galvanized by that.”

Lesser men might also be gobbled up by it. When you’re steamrolling toward a seemingly inevitable second consecutive national championship, when you’ve won 55 of your last 60 games, when you’ve won 10 straight NCAA Tournament games by double digits, one might be forgiven for feeling an enormous sense of growing pressure not to screw it up just shy of the finish line. Or maybe arrogance, that no one could possibly derail this train now. Or perhaps division, as outsiders begin to nitpick the juggernaut and single out which players are most important to the pursuit. Donovan warned Hurley about this.

“He was so big on the external,” Hurley says. “The disease of me. The old Pat Riley thing, ‘The Winner Within,’ right? Just really trying to root out in your culture any signs of petty jealousy, one player being promoted more than the others, rooting out any type of behavior, mindset, whispering in the organization that will destroy what we have right now. We’re not guaranteed to win another championship, but we have championship culture, and we want to keep that intact.”

Donovan remembers how America fell in love with Joakim Noah’s big personality during the first championship run, then decided he was a villain in the sequel. There’s some of that happening with Hurley right now. He’s the same sideline-stomping, referee-cursing, chest-thumping madman he ever was, but his audacity hits different now that he’s the reigning king, not some sneaky usurper.

Led by Hurley repeatedly calling his team “bulletproof” and talking about smacking every opponent so far in this tournament, “our players have a lot of swagger,” he says, “and our fan base is obnoxious as s— on social (media), so everyone hates us.” So long as that fuels the Huskies without consuming them, Donovan sees no problem there.

“There are a ton of distractions that come with trying to do it again,” Donovan says. “But I didn’t think our guys felt pressure. I think our guys leaned into that. Because that’s who we were, a bunch of competitors. That’s one thing I’ll say for Danny: He’s real and authentic and genuine to who he is. If he’s saying things about what a dominant team he’s got, it’s because he truly believes it, and he wants his team to believe it too. Bob Knight, Dean Smith, Rick Pitino, Nolan Richardson, they all won championships with different styles of play and very different personalities.

“I think that’s what makes great coaches great, that they stay true to who they are, because when your players see or feel like you’ve changed because of the moment, that’s not good.”

One area in which Hurley has never deviated: grueling practices. Donovan, a Pitino disciple who would scoff at what most consider a difficult workout, notes that times have changed and sometimes pushing players to their breaking point is frowned upon anymore. Hurley could not possibly care less.

“If you go there, you know what you’re walking into,” Donovan says. “The practices have to be harder than the games. They just have to be if you want to be great. Danny understands that if they can get through the adversity inside of practice, they’re gonna get through the adversity inside of games. Sometimes coaches are perceived to be ‘punishing’ players in practice, when it’s not really punishment. It’s getting them to understand that they have to be prepared for the most difficult situations, so that when those moments hit, they lean into those moments; they don’t back away from them.”

That’s why Hurley is fairly dismissive of a frequently asked question: What happens if Connecticut, with the gaudy 35-3 record and very few close calls all season, finds itself in a tight game with the national championship hanging in the balance?

“We’ve played under pressure on a daily basis,” he says, “because our practice is very intense.”

The result is beautiful basketball, played with so much effort it looks effortless, with so much style it looks like a party, with so little stress it looks like nirvana. If actually winning the championship isn’t Hurley’s purpose, maybe it’s this: to relentlessly pursue hard things, and teach young men to do hard things, until they’re easy.

“I love watching them play, because they play connected, they look like they’re having fun out there,” says Green, starting point guard on both those Florida title teams. “The joy they play with, the way they’re dialed into the scout, focused on every possession, it’s all those little things we had that you can see in UConn.”

“This was the hardest part, getting to the Final Four,” Horford says. “Once they get there, I feel like they know what to do. I thought their biggest challenge would be early in the tournament — and they ran through that. So just keep doing what they do and they should be fine.”

Green remembers that before Florida began its title defense, Donovan gathered the team and told them they were no longer on top of the mountain. That they’d be starting back from the bottom, and they couldn’t take the same, well-worn path to the top. That there would be a new route and new obstacles, “so just embrace the journey and live in the moment.” Hurley gave his team a similar message in the preseason. “Since June, we’ve worked like we haven’t won anything,” he says, “and I think that’s the secret sauce.”

Donovan has become something of an expert on sports figures who are addicted to chasing greatness. He quotes Tiger Woods on his insatiable appetite for winning. But he offers one last word of advice for anyone in the throes of that particular affliction, courtesy of his friend and renowned performance psychologist, Dr. Jim Loehr.

“He said everybody’s chasing something, and there’s nothing wrong with chasing,” Donovan recalls. “But what is the chase turning you into? Is it turning you into a better coach, better person, better husband, better father? Or is it creating something in you that you despise? To me, it’s all about the struggle inside of that chase with other people who are committed to each other. These opportunities to do what they’re trying to do, if viewed the right way, can build incredible characteristics to help you be very successful in every aspect of your life. The tricky part is keeping that in proper perspective.”

(Top photos of Dan Hurley from last week and Billy Donovan from 2007: Michael Reaves / Getty Images; and Mark Humphrey / AP)