The Huskies’ timing could not have been worse. In the conference realignment that took place in 2004 and 2005, Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College bolted to the A.C.C. The Big East was especially furious about the defection of the Eagles, an original conference member. Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, who is now Connecticut’s senior senator, sued Boston College, along with its athletic director, Gene DeFilippo, on behalf of several of the universities. That turned out to be a bad mistake.

It is extraordinarily difficult for a Johnny-come-lately to become a football power. With no football tradition to speak of, and a lack of big-time recruits in New England, UConn was fighting uphill. It had some moderate success in 2009 and 2010, years when it played in back-to-back bowl games. But it lost money on its Fiesta Bowl appearance in 2011, and the coach, Randy Edsall, didn’t even bother to fly back to Connecticut with the team, instead becoming the head coach at Maryland. (The Terrapins fired him in 2015.) On the heels of those bowl appearances came the next round of conference realignment. The Big Ten poached Nebraska from the Big 12 — for football reasons, obviously. Then the A.C.C. invited two more universities, bringing its total to 14. It was no surprise that Syracuse was one of them. The shocker was that despite the A.C.C.’s storied basketball tradition, it picked Pitt over UConn.

Why? Boston College had blackballed UConn. “We didn’t want them in,” DeFilippo told The Boston Globe in 2011. “It was a matter of turf. We wanted to be the New England team.”

(When I spoke to him last week, DeFilippo denied doing any such thing. “I didn’t like being sued,” he said, “but it’s the university presidents who vote, not the A.D.s.”)

When the Big Ten, which had formed the first all-conference television network in 2007, decided it could increase revenue by breaking into the New York media market, it chose woeful Rutgers over UConn. That is because the Big Ten universities pride themselves on being members of the Association of American Universities, a prestigious, if anachronistic, organization of top research institutions.

Rutgers was in the A.A.U., UConn wasn’t — and that was that.

The biggest blow, though, came in late 2012, when the A.C.C., needing to replace Maryland after it had also departed for the Big Ten, picked Louisville instead of UConn. Most of the A.C.C.’s presidents wanted UConn, which has a much higher U.S. News ranking than Louisville. But two of the A.C.C.’s most important football programs, Florida State and Clemson, insisted on Louisville, whose football team was ranked 13th that year. Fearing that the two universities might leave the A.C.C., and thus diminish the value of its television contracts, the conference reluctantly opted for Louisville.

It’s fair to say that the Huskies have never really recovered from the rejection they experienced during the conference realignment. For a university that viewed itself as among the athletic elite, the sense of being on the outside looking in is painful. UConn fans — and the entire state, for that matter — feel diminished and underappreciated. They miss those great Big East rivalries. For the women’s basketball team, the A.A.C. competition is a joke. The A.A.C. men’s teams play at a higher level, but the fans still don’t get excited over a UConn-Houston game the way they once did when UConn played, say, Georgetown. Although UConn officials say that being in the A.A.C. hasn’t hurt recruiting, it will eventually.