This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's April 2 issue, The Dominant 20. Subscribe today!

With three games to win for his 10th undefeated regular season, Geno Auriemma turns an empty $700 bottle of French wine upside down on a sterling silver coaster. He's explaining to me and his video guy how a steel mill works, specifically the one where he worked in college. He points at the neck, which represents the ground floor where he spent his days. The molten metal once set his shoes on fire. Tonight feels about as far away from burning shoes as a man can travel. He's relaxed. The Connecticut team charter landed in New Orleans two hours ago. Auriemma and Ben Kantor, the video coordinator, dropped their bags and walked to the French Quarter. It's past 10 p.m. now in Brennan's on Royal Street. Old boards creak under foot. Mack the Knife plays on the stereo. Waiters cook Steak Diane and Bananas Foster tableside. Ben and I are laughing, and Geno is laughing, because using $700 wine to break down the physics of a factory is ridiculous and hilarious and yet somehow makes sense.

Auriemma was born in an Italian village named Montella and has scars on his chest from accidentally rolling into hot coals as a toddler. That's how they kept babies warm in his old life, laying them close to a fire. He arrived in America at 7 on a boat with his mother, who didn't speak a word of English. Neither she nor Geno's father ever learned to read or write, and at 8, he paid the family's bills. He's wholly self-made and is so successful he goes entire seasons without losing and appreciates really expensive wine, like the empty, upside-down Chateau Rayas bottle on the table, soon to be replaced by a full one, right side up. He's happy and yet tonight he's nursing a feeling he can't quite shake, one that builds with each undefeated day. The lopsided victories breed complacency and he's worried about a meltdown.

"We are heading towards one," he says.

Ben starts laughing.

"He doesn't believe it," Geno says.

A bowl of turtle soup arrives. The waiter offers to pour a shot of sherry in it. "Please," Geno says before turning back toward Ben. He's talking about the first title in 1995 and how that felt so satisfying. "I gotta say," he says, "It's been all downhill from there. Unless we win a national championship, it's a bad year."

All coaches face stress but Auriemma's personal grinder -- annihilate all comers during the regular season and let everything ride on six NCAA tournament games -- is a crucible his former star Sue Bird calls "a mind f---." The need for perfection, in conflict with the human inability to ever actually achieve it, seems like a recipe for a one-way ticket to a loony bin. Auriemma laughs and smiles.

"I got a bag of pills in my briefcase," he says. "I got issues."

TWELVE HOURS LATER, he's pissed.

It's the early afternoon in New Orleans, and his players filter inside the Tulane arena for shoot-around. Geno walks slow behind them, a shuffle almost. His steps look heavy. He's mad at his team for lots of things, like not keeping their hands up on defense, which is really just a symptom of a larger disease. He's mad at two freshmen, Megan Walker and Mikayla Coombs, for nearly everything. He's mad at his two seniors, Kia Nurse and Gabby Williams, for not taking more responsibility for the freshmen. He's mad at himself for not making them play like some of his other great teams, who walked into opposing arenas like wolves. While the team stretches, Auriemma talks to the television crew who'll broadcast tonight's game, complaining with his wry sense of humor about his team's lack of basketball sense and fundamentals. He's been on a "kids these days" rant.

"You know what they say now?" Geno says to the television folks. "He's just an old guy who's angry and bitter. I'm not angry and bitter. I'm just sayin' ... ."

No team in the history of sports has faced the UConn Huskies' ongoing problem. Only a perfect or nearly perfect record is a success. In all, they've won 11 national titles in the past 23 years, including a run of four in a row. They've had a 90-game winning streak and a 111-game winning streak. For most of the past 33 years, the enemy of the Connecticut basketball team hasn't been the opponent. It's been themselves.

For the Huskies, the greatest obstacles to a championship are their own worst impulses. To believe the praise. To feel entitled to 30-point wins. To not grind over the small details that make up a perfect game. Recently he railed against a player who couldn't or wouldn't box out: What if we need one rebound to win a national title? A memory from the 2012 semifinal against Notre Dame fueled his anger. "The kids look at me," he says his voice rising to a scream. "I go, 'Yeah, you know why I said that? That happened to us. We had to get one f------ rebound. If we do, we win. The kid didn't get it. And we lost.'"

Auriemma has a curious, creative basketball mind but his greatest talent is understanding and preventing self-destruction. Practices and shoot-arounds like this one in New Orleans are where he does his work. He loves it when a highly touted freshman starts in her first fall and realizes the intensity at UConn practice is something new and animalistic.

He'll stare and say, "You just realized you came to the wrong school, huh?"

A few years ago, Rebecca Lobo texted him a jab typical in the Husky family.

Go see Whiplash.

That guy reminds me of you.

All this winning has left them mostly numb to success. Once they celebrated. Back when the team flew commercial, everyone would go out for big dinners and toast each win. Now they're moving fast across the country, landing in town like the circus and blowing some poor opponent out before getting back on the plane. Nine years ago, Auriemma took USA Basketball to play in Russia against teams with international stars. He didn't have his main roster. Nobody expected his team to win, which it ultimately did. Sitting on the bench, an assistant coach asked him the last time he'd been an underdog.

"I don't remember," Geno said.

Two years ago, the Huskies blew out highly touted Ohio State in the season opener. Afterward, he walked into the locker room and wrote "Veni, Vidi, Vici" on the board and told his team they were going to be like the Roman legions: roll into town, conquer everything and go back home. Now he regrets being so businesslike. They've lost the ability to celebrate anything other than a ring. The only available emotion at the end of a year is relief. "Everyone else thinks you have a flawless team," he says, "and you're the only one who's miserable. Before you know it, the season is over and you didn't have any fun. I have to keep reminding everybody, myself included, we have to celebrate every little thing we do." He's given the Huskies three specific goals for their final three regular season games against Tulane, SMU and South Florida.

1. Play more suffocating defense

2. Run their fast break more ruthlessly

3. Get smarter at the little stuff that decides close games

March is approaching and he'd like to have tangible victories to celebrate. In the Tulane gym at walk-through, his longtime assistant Chris Dailey starts running their usual drills. He walks out to the court to watch.

He shakes his head and curses silently to himself.

Nobody has their hands up.

THE PROGRAM COULD not perpetuate itself without his unrelenting recognition of his player's flaws, day after day, no matter their record. It comes naturally. He knows his own worst enemy, like his team, has always been himself. Since childhood, he's spent so much time trying to see himself clearly that it's given him deep insight into others. Despite his frequent raging, empathy is his strongest trait; the ability to peer into people's most private, insecure selves and make their weak places strong. His success comes from seeking to fix in others what he longs to fix in himself. The teams are proxies. Nothing as extreme as the Huskies dynasty ever springs from a normal place. As he and his wife hang out one afternoon, I tell them I didn't think he was joking about the pills in his briefcase.

"You want me to show them to you?" he says.

Kathy Auriemma steps in.

"No," she says.

He wears his anger at the Huskies' mistakes on the outside -- anger which seems closely tied to his own insecurity and desire to improve -- and former players have stories of epic freak-outs. Sue Bird says one day he hid beneath the bleachers, despondent, refusing to come back out. The team wasn't grasping some simple basketball concept and it broke something in him. He told them that maybe he'd lost the ability to teach, and that he was having a nervous breakdown. The terrified team finally went home. A former player who happened to be visiting, Nykesha Sales, tried to coax him back onto the court.

"You've got to come out," she said.

"Leave me alone," he said.

"You're making us a little concerned. Are you okay?"

He didn't answer and stayed hidden until he felt like seeing people again. The root cause of what's now viewed as a funny story was his own self-doubt. It's his greatest burden. He says he can never shake this feeling of "yeah ... but."

Yeah, he's won 1,000 games ... but part of him internalizes the common criticism that he's not coaching D-1 men or in the NBA. It's a criticism he levels at himself from time to time, as he fights the urge to diminish his own accomplishments. When Connecticut fires its men's coach in early March and rumors start circulating about Geno moving across the hall, his first thought is, "I wish I was younger." He wonders what his life might be like if he'd aimed higher; with 11 national titles in men's basketball, he says one night, he'd be a senator. This "yeah, but" -- the desire to find clouds among his silver linings -- exists in his earliest memories. Growing up, he never felt like the best version of himself, working to learn a new language and find his place, caught between worlds. He wishes he'd gone to better schools or studied harder in the schools he did attend. He wishes many things for himself, but the closest he can come to grasping them is when he helps his players avoid his mistakes. Since he can't actually go back in time, the best he can do is fix his past through them. He gives them the attention he always craved.

Yeah, he's undefeated ... but those wins don't mean a thing without a title.

"I have to fight the urge to constantly look to March," he says.

He pauses in his kitchen.

"I think my worst impulse might be to rail at every ... ," he says, searching for the right word.

"Imperfection," Kathy says softly, trying to help.

"... Injustice," he says finally. "Every injustice against the game, I go crazy."

The stress and expectations have been unrelenting since that first title in 1995 and have been at a particular crushing peak for the past nine years. In 2009, Connecticut won a national title and he was named the head coach of USA Basketball. In 2010, he won a title with UConn and a World Championship with USA. Those seasons bled into one another. In 2011 he lost in the Final Four. In 2012 he lost in the Final Four and then went straight to London to win the gold medal. In 2013-2016, the Huskies won four national championships and he capped the seven-year manic run with a second gold medal in Rio. It's a lot for a person to bear: expecting to win every game, and to get everyone's best shot, with either a championship or an embarrassing defeat as binary endings. "That's not healthy," he says. "It's awful to carry that around with you all the time."