It's commonplace for basketball coaches to use boxing analogies when talking about their own team's mindset or formula for success. The Sweet Science offers no shortage of valuable lessons that could be applied on the hardwood, in the boxing ring, or in life. Now admittedly, I don't have a whole heck of a lot of experience with the actual sport of boxing, but I am more familiar than the average man is with the movies of the Rocky and Creed film series', so at the very least, I can speak to this with movie lines… classics like, “It ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward.” Or my personal favorite, “One step at a time. One punch at a time. One round at a time.”

UConn head coach Dan Hurley has his own philosophy and set of beliefs on how his Huskies squad, who after a Final Four win are now just a single victory away from winning their second consecutive National Championship, and in typical Rocky Balboa fashion, it's all about getting inside, absorbing their opponent's best shot, and continuing to work the body.

“It's body blows, it's body blows,” Dan Hurley said following UConn's win over Alabama in the Final Four on Saturday night, per Jeff Borzello of ESPN.com. “It's continue to guard, continue to rebound, execute our offense. Eventually there will be a breaking-point opportunity that will present itself, especially in this tournament.”

Throughout their first four games of the NCAA Tournament, it didn't take UConn very long to break their opponents. In 160 minutes of action, UConn trailed for less than one total minute. But on Saturday night in the Final Four, it took UConn longer than we're accustomed to seeing in order to finally throw enough body blows to put a confident and talented Alabama Crimson Tide squad away. Even in the stickiest moments, the Huskies never wilted. They relentlessly kept coming, and kept coming, until finally, Alabama was broken.

“Our identity is to be pretty relentless,” Hurley said. “We might not break you for 18 minutes, 25 minutes, but at some point if what we're doing at both ends and on the backboard is at a high level, it just becomes hard for the other team to sustain it.”

The Huskies now find themselves one win away from their second consecutive National Title, but by simply counting the number of Final Four appearances and championships won over a twelve-month period would be doing a disservice to the unbelievable turnaround that Dan Hurley has sparked in Storrs, Connecticut. Remember, it was just a little over four years ago, when UConn was still in the AAC and in the midst of what would've been a fourth straight season missing out on the NCAA Tournament had it not been for the COVID-19 Pandemic, that Dan Hurley offered a warning shot to the rest of the college basketball world.

Three years later, the Huskies rampaged to the program's fifth National Championship, and now, with an 11-game double-digit winning streak in the NCAA Tournament, Connecticut has the opportunity to cement itself as the premier powerhouse in college basketball. This particular team has the chance to go down as one of the greatest to ever do it. And that's because as Dan Hurley said confidently on Saturday night, “We make a hard tournament look easy.”

UConn's hardest test will come in the National Championship Game against two-time National Player of the Year Zach Edey and the Purdue Boilermakers, who are looking to make some of their own history, after being knocked out of the NCAA Tournament in the 1st Round last year by 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson.

For UConn, the days of being knocked out of the tournament in the opening weekend, or missing out on the Big Dance altogether, are a thing of the past. There is a renewed standard of excellence in Storrs, and as long as Dan Hurley is in the picture, the Huskies will continue beating down opponents with a flurry of body blows that would make The Italian Stallion proud.