Hartford — It is the question that vexes the Connecticut fanbase: why football? Not "why" as in questioning the program's existence, but why, given our passions, we must adhere to the theory that football "drives the bus."

Don't we already have bus drivers? Or the whole bus company? It's called basketball. And nowhere else in the country have programs of both genders accomplished more in the last 30 years, evidenced by a combined 14 national championships.

This is where many who follow sports in Connecticut, buying the season tickets and making all the donations for the right to purchase such tickets, scratch their heads. They see UConn basketball on television every night. In the middle of NCAA tournaments and Final Fours, which exist to make money. Basketball as the vehicle delivering UConn from a New England niche to a national monolith.

And yet, clearly, it's not enough. Theorize all you want about UConn's plight and how it got somewhere out of the big money. This much we know: If college basketball had football's cachet, UConn would among the privileged and not in the American Athletic Conference.

So here is was, Monday night, basketball night, at the XL Center. The UConn women are back in business, tending to the business of winning. A few moments before tipoff, public address announcer John Tuite reminded the crowd of the football team's victory two days earlier over Houston — probably one of the top five wins in program history — telling everyone football is bowl eligible and to be on alert for tickets in the coming days.

It drew a polite golf clap, ever so fittingly.

It made me wonder what Geno Auriemma thinks of all this. Geno is a passionate sports fan, knows many of the dramatis personae who run college sports and rarely resists the opportunity to opine on such topics. (My favorite: "Notre Dame is like Robin Hood. They take from the rich and give to Notre Dame.")

So to a coach who couldn't possibly give his university more positive publicity, what did Saturday's victory mean in the grand scheme of all things UConn — and why should we all view it as important? After all, Auriemma's teams win 30 games every year, but are failures if they don't win national titles. Football may go 6-6 and to a minor bowl game and we need to breathe into brown paper bags?

"It's hard to explain. It's almost like a big company that has three or four major divisions and two or three are working their butts off making a ton of money, but they know the other one is the core, the bread and butter, and we have to be good at it or the others ones don't matter," Auriemma said.

"It's the world we live in and the world we're going to live in. Football drives the bus? The bigger question to me — and I've said a few things about fans in general over the years that have gotten me in trouble — if you say football drives the bus and you want that bus to go somewhere, the biggest question to me is 'who's on the bus?' Or is the bus just the team? The bus has got to be, figuratively, the entire state of Connecticut. Or people looking from the outside are going to think, 'that ain't such a great bus.'"

Auriemma went to the game Saturday. He was disappointed in the crowd total, optimistically announced at around 27,000. He believes that future years need to produce better attendance totals in all sports, lest bigger conferences start wondering if support for UConn sports is overrated. But to the people who showed up and stayed at football Saturday ...

"The situation we're in, you sort of need to remind people we've done this before," he said. "Maybe we haven't beaten the No. 13 team in the country in November, but we've won a bunch of games and gone to a major bowl. It's not like this is the first chance we've had to go to a bowl game.

"But what happens when you suffer a couple of bad seasons is people forgot all the good days," Auriemma said. "The biggest thing I took away from being there is it was a reminder we could be really good. Lots of young guys on our team. And for the fans that stayed to the end, the last six minutes were great theater.

"I loved the players' reactions on the sidelines when they knew they were going to win. You practice every day, bust your butt every day. You just want people to care. Not that you wouldn't do it any differently if they didn't care, but at some point, it's good for the kids to know there's a lot of people that care. Maybe not as many as we want yet, but there's a lot of people who care."

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.

Twitter: @BCgenius