As the next great UConn big man ascended Monday night, bound for a net half-dangling off the NRG Stadium’s north rim, Emeka Okafor paused and held out a hand. The kid from Mali who was a soccer player until he was 15, who didn’t even want to come to America at first, cutting his strand of nylon as midnight struck back east. The ballast for a national champion. The NCAA Tournament’s most outstanding player. Everything the Huskies needed, whenever they needed it.

A sight that defied description. So a gesture had to do.

Adama Sanogo’s moment arrived, and would you look at that?

“Every team needs a dominant big,” Okafor told The Athletic, hovering near the fringes of a celebration with a handful of other program greats on hand for the occasion. “When your team has a dominant big, that team does well. And he’s a testament to that.”

One man standing at the end of the Year of the Big, a fourth double-double in six NCAA Tournament games making a final argument none of the others survived long enough in this tournament to match — while also vaulting Sanogo into the company he’d aimed to keep ever since Okafor visited Storrs over the summer, providing a living and breathing roadmap to who UConn’s center of the present wanted to be. “He’s obviously cemented himself into the pantheon of greatest,” Huskies coach Dan Hurley said. “To have the national championship just puts him in that position in one of the most storied programs in college basketball. He’s an all-time great.”

No wonder Sanogo bounced on his toes as time wound down on a 76-59 win over San Diego State, anxious to fulfill dreams big and small at the horn. This was a small one: A day earlier, Sanogo visualized a fifth national championship for his school and, in turn, securing the game ball for posterity. So the clock ran down and walk-on guard Andrew Hurley spiked the orb on the floor, and Sanogo leaped from the bench area to chase after a souvenir.