When the NCAA Tournament begins in earnest on Thursday, one question dominates above all.

Will UConn repeat as national champion? (ESPN BET puts the Huskies’ odds at +370, best in the field.)

The top overall seed in the field after a 31-3 campaign that saw the Huskies sweep the Big East regular season and tournament championships, Danny Hurley’s team has the best chance to repeat in at least a decade, based on talent, seed, and returning production.

But it’s excruciatingly hard to go back-to-back.

John Wooden’s UCLA won 10 national championships between 1964 and 1975, a tumultuous era in the sport that spanned the pre-integration and modern, post-integration eras and included significantly smaller fields.

If the modern era of college hoops truly began, as the Naismith Hall of Fame suggests, when college basketball fully integrated in 1973, only 2 other programs have even won back-to-back national championships.

Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke, led by Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer Christian Laettner, did it in 1991 and 1992.

Billy Donovan’s Florida, which featured the same starting 5 for each championship, did it in 2006 and 2007.

Whether it was UCLA, Duke or Florida, the foundation of each championship program was culture. But what does that mean? And what separated UCLA, Duke and Florida?

The Blue Devils were meticulous, detail-oriented, and motivated by the failures that predated their back-to-back journey.

“That was as relentless a group as I ever coached. And they understood togetherness. They knew that they were like five fingers on a hand — if you use them all together, you have a fist,” Krzyzewski reflected to media before his final NCAA Tournament in 2022.

The Gators were the consummate team, the only repeat national champion in the modern era to feature the same starting 5 in back-to-back seasons.

“There was a drive for excellence and a hunger to get better every day,” Billy Donovan told SDS in 2022, when Florida celebrated the 15th anniversary of the second championship. “There was also selflessness. … Chris Richard could have complained about minutes or transferred. He was Mr. Basketball in Florida. Instead, he accepted a role as 6th man on 2 title teams. What kind of young person makes these types of sacrifices? There’s a vulnerability in doing that, in accepting something greater than yourself to chase a goal. That separated those teams.”

Danny Hurley’s UConn has shades of the winning cultures that defined each of UCLA, Duke and Florida.

“There is not a more process-oriented, selfless, tough culture that combines seamlessly with talent than what UConn has right now,” ESPN analyst Jay Bilas told SDS earlier this season.

The Huskies have been dominant throughout their repeat quest season.

UConn is 31-3, and the nation’s top ranked team in both the polls and analytics (KenPom), and like Duke and Florida, a prohibitive favorite to win the national championship.

Several of the best sports betting apps have already released odds for who will win the national championship.

But like the Blue Devils and Gators, who both suffered eye-opening losses in February in their repeat campaigns, the Huskies have had their hiccups and testy moments. UConn lost its Big East opener to a middling Seton Hall team, and after pounding a top 5 Marquette team at home in mid-February, the Huskies were blown out at Creighton, falling back to earth.

“We aren’t invincible or as good as we think we are,” Hurley told the media after the Creighton loss. But Hurley took the loss in stride, too, posting a Game of Thrones Cersei Lannister “Shame” video to Twitter and telling fans that the Huskies would see them on the weekend.

“We pursue success with singularity,” Hurley said at the Big East Tournament last week. “We also understand that you can lose a game in the regular season and the world keeps turning. That’s not accepting losing. It’s understanding that we are humans striving to be more perfect even though we won’t ever be perfect. We’ve got a great culture. And not everybody in the country can say that.”

Hurley is right. To win a second national championship, the Huskies don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be themselves.

The Huskies are the best offensive team in America from an efficiency standpoint, and the stuff they run is “so good it is like they are playing a different game than everyone else,” one highly respected college basketball consultant told me this week.

The Huskies are a marvelous cutting team and constantly pressure opposing defenses at the rim, which means they can get 2 point buckets in high volume even when the 3 isn’t falling. They have balanced scoring, led by triple-double threat point guard Tristan Newton, Cam Spencer, a fantastic shooter and cutter, and Alex Karaban, a do-everything big man who averages 13.9 points per game and shoots almost 40% from beyond the arc. A healthy Donovan Clingan gives the Huskies an immoveable post, and Stephon Castle gives UConn a 5-star freshman who can explode for 20 any given night. That whole paragraph didn’t even reference Jaylin Stewart, who came off the bench to rescue UConn in a nip and tuck Big East Tournament final.

In the age of NIL and the transfer portal, Hurley has managed to keep all these talents happy, and get contributions from bench players like Stewart who, as a top-100 recruit out of high school, could have gone anywhere else and played a consistently larger role.

Selfishness isn’t what UConn basketball is about though, and so Stewart stayed, and Alex Karaban, who Stewart replaced on the floor in the Big East title game, sang Stewart’s praises in the postgame, his sing song sentiments speaking to UConn’s togetherness. That togetherness has also helped UConn play its best defense of the season entering March. The Huskies guard you, first and foremost, and they’ve only given up more than 67 points once since the loss to Creighton. Throw all this together, and it’s easy to see a scenario where UConn coasts to a second consecutive national title.

Of course, that brings us back to Duke and Florida.

The Gators dominated the 2007 NCAA Tournament, but not without a hard fought, foul trouble plagued rock fight with Purdue in the second round, which Florida led by just 2 possessions at the final media timeout.

Duke’s second title was even more precarious, built on the backs of a miracle and the Shot Heard Round the World in Duke’s 1-point overtime win over Kentucky in the Elite 8.

A fellow Final Four team from a year ago, Florida Atlantic, potentially lurks for UConn in Round 2. An Auburn team with more length and physicality than anything UConn saw in the Big East this season is a potential Sweet 16 foe.

The path won’t be easy. It isn’t supposed to be. Winning in March is hard.

Winning championships is harder.

Repeating as champion?

That’s so hard that the teams that do it become immortal. That’s what UConn is chasing.