The Clark Lane Middle School Rubik’s Cube Club has already put their talents toward portraying a giant in human rights.

Now they’ve taken on giants in the sports world, and seem to have won them over.

The cube-obsessed students at Clark Lane have been puzzling over the toys and racing to beat their own speed records for solving them for years. They’ve also turned the cubes — and the math skills needed to solve them — into art, last year creating a mosaic portrait of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai that was displayed in Providence when Yousafzai spoke there last July.

This spring, the club got a new request, from the UConn women’s basketball team. A parent of one of the club’s 30 members who works for coach Geno Auriemma commissioned a new work that was supposed to be on display at the team’s victorious return to Storrs.

“We were crossing our fingers that they would win,” Clark Lane math teacher Jay Gionet said.

They didn’t – UConn lost to Mississippi State University by one basket in the Final Four – but the Rubik’s mosaic still got some use.

Gionet disassembled the mosaic, which depicts the UConn Huskies logo in 400 Rubik’s Cubes (that’s 3,600 individual pixels), and drove it to Storrs for the team’s annual end-of-season party on April 7.

Gionet said the mosaic was front and center at the party. One player, forward Gabby Williams, made a beeline to the cubes, grabbed one, and solved it in less than two minutes.

“She knew exactly how to solve it,” he said.

The mosaic took about 45 minutes for the club to put together, one 25-cube section at a time.

And both the UConn team and the Clark Lane club are optimistic they’ll have an even better reason to put the mosaic back together soon, Gionet said.

“All the players said, ‘You need to bring it back next year, when we win.’”

m.shanahan@theday.com