Jim Penders was tossing and turning all night, finally giving up on a full night’s sleep at 5 a.m. Saturday morning. To play Maine or not to play, that was his question.

With rain in the forecast, the UConn baseball team could play their regular-season finale and risk a damaging loss, for NCAA selection purposes, in a possibly shortened or disrupted game, or play it safe and just cancel it. The latter has been done before, when the screwy metrics involved makes it advantageous, and Maine was amenable.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘you’re stupid to play them, you can cancel the game, Maine (wouldn’t mind). It’s not going to help you, it could really hurt you,'” Penders said. “We could have dropped eight or nine points in the RPI and given the NCAA selection committee a reason not to say no to us. Yet, that’s not who we are. I said, ‘listen, we have to play this for the integrity of the schedule.'”

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So the Huskies took up arms, and bats, against the sea of troubles and prevailed 5-1, the game cinched with a 451-foot home run off the thunderous bat of freshman Connor Lane, from Old Saybrook. That made a three-game nonconference sweep of Maine, 23 wins in the last 25 games, and UConn held its RPI position in the top 40, solid, but not totally secure position for an at-large bid for the NCAA Tournament. The Huskies can remove all doubt by winning the Big East tournament in Mason, Ohio, beginning Wednesday night with a high-stakes match with Xavier.

“That’s how we have to do it,” Penders said, as he drove in to work Monday morning. “We can’t avoid the storms. This team has gone through the storms better than most. I always talk about the Colorado buffalo east of the Rockies. When they see a storm coming over the mountains, they run toward it. It seems intuitive to run away from it, but they intuitively know they’re going to get through it a lot sooner and better if they meet it head on. That’s what we’ve done pretty well over the years, and especially in the last six weeks.”

So Penders goes for the colorful analogy, me for the random Hamlet references. To thine own selves be true, above all.

UConn baseball, six weeks ago, was 13-17, and 2-4 in the Big East, seemingly headed nowhere. As one of the few northern teams with a national brand, they spend most of the first two months of the season on the road, playing power opponents to beef up their metrics before getting much chance to practice outdoors, settle into a routine and sort things out.

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But once assistant coach Jeff Hourigan, who handles the hitters, had the chance to collect and interpret the data and develop game plans for each plate appearance, the Huskies began raking themselves out of the rut they were in. The Huskies scored 10 or more runs in 16 of those last 25 games, and won 15 straight conference games to tie Creighton for the regular season title. Creighton, having won the head-to-head series, is the No. 1 seed, while UConn plays Xavier, also a top-40 team in RPI Wednesday night at 6:30 p.m. with Oliver Pudvar (6-1, 3.14) to start for UConn.

“We were in a hole, we dug out of it,” Penders said. “This year, it truly felt like we were playing elimination games in early April. And we’re not eliminated. You win 15 straight, I don’t care what league you’re in, 15 straight is something to be proud if.”

Fairfield (No. 2 seed) and Quinnipiac (No. 5) start play in the MAAC tournament this week in Pomona, N.Y. Central Connecticut, the No. 3 seed, plays for the NEC title in Wappingers Falls. Yale was eliminated in the Ivy championships, ending its NCAA hopes.

Northeastern, which beat UConn twice, and UConn are the best bets for a New England presence deep in the Field of 64, which will be revealed on Memorial Day. The UConn Huskies have won Regionals at Maryland in 2022 and Oklahoma in ’24 to reach the Super Regionals. Penders’ teams, who have been in the Tournament 10 times since 2010, have a way of playing their best baseball as postseason underdogs.

UConn (36-19) is hitting .313 as a team with 88 home runs. Ryan Daniels, from Meriden and St. Paul High in Bristol, is hitting .362 with 15 homers and 68 RBI, Tyler Minick is hitting .366 with 20 and 66. Centerfielder Caleb Shpur, from East Canaan, a transfer from D-III Endicott, is hitting .356 with a program-record 42 steals, throwing out only six times. Sam Biller and Grant MacCarther, from California, and Beau Root, from Washington Depot, transfer from Middlebury, have joined the 1-through-9 slugging party. Lane, the Gatorade state player of the year in 2024, has taken on more of the catching chores and has six homers and 34 RBI, most of that during the last 25 games.

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The pitching has been a work in progress, but relievers Brady Afthim, nine saves and a 1.34 ERA, Sean Finn (6-1, 3.26) have been able to get control of the high scoring games.

Penders, winningest coach in UConn’s long baseball history, finds a way to assemble teams that can find a way. He’s sleeping better now, believing this version of the Huskies knows which way to run when the next storm hits.

“This is a team that representative of all of our successful former teams,” Penders said. “There’s a lot of stick-to-itiveness and determination and mental toughness.”

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