Jonathan the Husky Has Discovered Empathy. The Timing Is Not Great.
After the UConn women's 54-game winning streak ended Friday at the Final Four in Phoenix, the Husky reportedly spent the night in the tunnel beneath Mortgage Matchup Center and made one phone call. The Blue Devil did not pick up.
PHOENIX, AZ — Jonathan the Husky, mascot of the UConn women’s basketball program, sat in the tunnel beneath Mortgage Matchup Center for forty-seven minutes after the final buzzer Friday and did not move.
Fifty-four games. He had not lost in fifty-four games. He had to look that up to confirm it, because somewhere around game thirty-one he had stopped thinking about losing as a thing that could happen and started thinking of it as a thing that happened to other programs.
At some point after midnight, he picked up his phone.
He looked up the Blue Devil.
Not to gloat. He wanted to be clear about that. The men’s team had beaten Duke six days ago and he had not called then either, because it had not seemed necessary. Duke losing to UConn had seemed like the natural order of things.
It didn’t seem like that anymore.
He typed: hey. i think i get it now.
He did not receive a response. Sources familiar with the Blue Devil’s current whereabouts confirm this is consistent with his recent availability.
Jonathan sat with the phone face-down on the concrete.
He had, as of about midnight, developed empathy. The timing was bad.
Corrections, plural: A previous version of this article contained three factual errors in fewer than two hundred words, which the editorial staff acknowledges is an achievement of a kind. This is in no way an indication that we assign less value to coverage of women’s sports. We promise.
The game was played on a Friday, not a Thursday.
The arena is called Mortgage Matchup Center, a name it has held since October 2025, and not Footprint Center, a name it has not held since then and that we used with considerable confidence regardless.
Finally, the UConn men’s team defeated Duke six days prior to publication, not eleven — we’d like to blame it on something like “we’re bad at math”, but that doesn’t even hold up here.
