BOSTON — Through the gates near Pesky’s Pole and up the right field line, the UConn men’s basketball team swaggered into Fenway Park, right into the middle of The Greatest Rivalry in Sports.

In this part of the world, at least in this column, that’s an official title that’s still valid, even if Red Sox-Yankees is currently a rivalry in recession. By October, for all we know, it could be roaring back, front and center in the lunch counter and coffee shop discourse across the state. There’s a void in Connecticut’s summer without the angst.

But on as perfect a day as a June Saturday in Boston could be, Yankees fans and Red Sox fans at Fenway could tap their cups of beer and agree on something and admire UConn’s dominance in the vast, title-steeped region covering Storrs North and Storrs South. Then they could put their beers down and ask Dan Hurley to sign on the back or belly of their tee shirts. Joe Castiglione, the Hamden guy who has been voice of the Red Sox for over 40 years, joked the Huskies will be more popular than ever in Boston, now that Hurley turned down the Los Angeles Lakers.

“It was good to go have lunch here, and these guys got a standing ovation,” Hurley said. “They got a sense of the bigness of this thing, how big the program is for people who haven’t been a part of it and what the bar is when the champs go out in public.”

The bar in this part of the world is not set at winning a championship. Championships are like beers at the ballparks in New York, Boston and points in between, you don’t stop with one. Or two.

Alex Karaban, who represented his team on the bump and delivered a strike, has grown up with it in Southborough, 35 miles down the Mass Pike. He’s not old enough to remember when the Sox were “cursed” or the Patriots hapless or the Celtics coming to grips with who was or wasn’t “walking through that door.” His Boston sports life experiences, 2002 to the present, includes five of the six Patriots titles, four Red Sox championships, a Celtics championship with another on the way (because who ever heard of blowing a 3-0 lead in a seven-game series?), and one Bruins Stanley Cup.

“It’s best sports town out there,” Karaban said, “I mean, based on the championships. I don’t follow baseball that much, but you knew when the Red Sox were winning the World Series, the Patriots, the dynasty they had, the Celtics. It’s special being around winning franchises.”

New York has had a few dynasties, too, but it will be up to Hurley and Hassan Diarra to speak to all that when the Huskies are honored at Yankee Stadium on July 6, when maybe the a Yankees-Red Sox game will have more juice.

The back-to-back champs at least reintroduced Fenway’s faithful, the ones faithful enough not to sell their tickets to Yankees fans on the secondary market, of the look, the talk and the walk of champions.

It is rare to walk into the Red Sox clubhouse and see so little in the way of star power as is the case now. Owner John Henry has ruffled some feathers when he said Red Sox fans’ expectations have become too high. “Because fans expect championships almost annually,” he said. “They easily become frustrated and are not going to buy into what the odds actually are: 1-in-20, 1-in-30.”

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