Storrs — It started with six words.

Never have six words spoken so loudly.

Geno Auriemma will coach his 1,202nd game with the UConn women’s basketball team Sunday when the fifth-ranked Huskies host California in their regular season opener at Gampel Pavilion. For the 1,202nd time, the six words will be written on the board:

Play hard. Play smart. Have fun.

“It’s a mantra,” former UConn point guard Sue Bird said. “You don't even have to say those words and you can ask a Connecticut player, ‘What does coach Auriemma say? What’s the last thing coach Auriemma tells you before you go on the court? What’s on almost every T-shirt that they give you?’ It’s 'Play hard, play smart, have fun.’

“It’s pretty self-explanatory. But the difference for a lot of programs, a lot of players, is sometimes they can be just words. He lives by it. He holds you accountable.”

The record speaks for itself. In the 34 years of Auriemma’s Hall of Fame career, the Huskies have a 1,062-139 record and his winning percentage of .884 is tops all time. They’ve won 11 national championships and earned 20 Final Four berths, both records, during a run of 31 consecutive NCAA tournament appearances. Then there are 25 regular-season league crowns and 24 league tournament titles.

But noticeably none of those six words that make up that mantra is “win” or “winning.” Before Auriemma’s arrival in 1985, UConn finished over .500 once and its longest winning streak was five.

“When we first started we didn’t talk a lot about winning because I didn’t know if winning was the main objective,” Auriemma said. “I didn’t know if winning was feasible at that time. So early on it became about what are the things we can actually control? What are the things I think make really good teams? And we want to be able to take certain things for granted. Those three things are we want to play hard, we want to be the smartest team on the court and we want to enjoy playing. Over the years, we’ve done that.”

Over the years, the mantra has aged well.

Many of his players have lived by those words as they have gone on to play professionally here and internationally.

When the Seattle Storm won the WNBA championship a year ago, Breanna Stewart became the 11th player to win NCAA and WNBA titles and FIBA World Cup and Olympic gold medals. Seven of those 11 — Bird, Stewart, Diana Taurasi, Maya Moore, Swin Cash, Asjha Jones and Kara Wolters — are former Huskies.

“I think it's more of a statement of how coach Auriemma is,” Taurasi said. “While people get caught up in all the cute stuff and all the gimmicks, coach has always been a guy where there’s a foundation to what he does. Those three things really symbolize the foundation of what he thinks a basketball team should act like, play like and be like every single day.”

For Auriemma, though, there are things that are non-negotiable. One of them is playing hard.

After a UConn win, he will not tell the losing coach that his or her team played hard. He’d consider it an insult if an opposing coach said it to him after his or her team beat the Huskies that they played hard.

“It’s one of the worst things that you can ever say to a coach when you shake hands with them,” Auriemma said. “Your kids played really hard, meaning the one thing that’s obvious you should be able to do, you did it really well. You sucked at everything else but you played hard.

“When I put on the board playing hard, that’s not something we’re going to get compliments from. We take that for granted. Being smart, we take that for granted. Enjoy playing basketball, we expect that to be part of what we do. We put that up on the board because, ‘This is what we do.’ The other stuff, that changes game to game. Those three things, that’s who we are. That’s who we want to be. That’s the way our program should be talked about. They compete, they’re smart and they enjoy what they do.”

The mantra wasn’t just about UConn, but for any team he coached.

The six words showed up on the board for every game for the eight years he guided the United States national team, which won two Olympic gold medals and two World Cup gold medals in his tenure.

“I did that for USA Basketball because I think anytime the focus is on winning, winning, winning, winning, I’ve never been comfortable with that,” Auriemma said. “Winning is important, don’t get me wrong. But if you really compete and you’re smart and you enjoy playing, all the other things that go along with it are going to come.”

The six words are powerful for veteran players.

And meaningful for rookies, too.

“It’s what UConn is about," said former UConn forward Napheesa Collier, the 2019 WNBA Rookie of the Year. “It was how we wanted to play the game and represent ourselves. Whenever I think about those words, I think of the legacy of UConn.”

Point guard Crystal Dangerfield will see the words when she’s in the locker room Sunday and when she’s in the UConn locker room at Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gym next week and until the night her final season with the Huskies comes to an end.

She gets them, even though she was 12 1/2 years away from being born the first time Auriemma put them on a board at Iona College on Nov. 23, 1985.

“It symbolizes what this entire program was built on,” Dangerfield said. “Play hard ... If you don’t play hard, you’re not going to win anything. Play smart ... Again, it’s the same thing. If you don’t play smart, you’re not going to win. But, if you do those two things, if you play hard and you do play smart, the result is that you will have fun. You’re going to be successful, you’re going be doing great things on the floor, you’re going to be winning. To me, you can’t have one without the other two.”

They are just six words, but over 35 years they have added up to so much more.

And they’re not done yet.

“Coach Auriemma embodies it and he expects that of his players,” Bird said. “It’s ingrained. If I ever coach a team, that will be the final thing I will say, too.”