PHILADELPHIA — The center came from a world away with limited basketball skills. The point guard, a highly touted recruit, nearly died from a brain hemorrhage and then almost threw his career away by finding trouble. Their journeys have been as different as miles traveled and lessons learned, but Connecticut's two best players, Hasheem Thabeet and A.J. Price, have arrived in the same place, hoping to add their first banner to the crowded rafters of Gampel Pavilion.

Heading into today's first-round NCAA tournament game against No.16 seed Chattanooga in Philadelphia, the Huskies, the No.1 seed in the West, have been continually reminded they haven't won a postseason game since 2006. Two years ago, they failed to make the NCAA tournament after a 17-14 campaign; last year, they lost to San Diego in the first round after Price tore a ligament in his left knee nine minutes into the game.

These Huskies have won 51 games the last two seasons but still are defined by what they haven't done: win a title.

"These guys have been through a journey," coach Jim Calhoun says of his 27-4 team. "Here you're going to have to leave something, because guys in front of you left something. When you're following Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon and all those kinds of people, that's a lot of weight on your shoulders. There's people who think the game passed me by. That's OK. But those people then put that on these guys. So this is their last opportunity."

When Thabeet, a 7-3 junior from Tanzania, arrived in Storrs, he could run the court and block shots, but he had limited offensive skills. "Freshman year, you couldn't throw him the ball and expect anything to happen with it," Price says.

What Thabeet remembers the most from his first summer workout, before the 2006-07 season, is Calhoun's booming voice.

"Coach passed by the court and yelled at me for not running full speed," Thabeet says.

"It was so hard to get him to do extra work," Calhoun says.

One day, the coach, frustrated with Thabeet, exploded in practice.

"I'm trying to make you millions of dollars. Do you understand?" Calhoun shouted. "Right now, you're a tall person, not a basketball player."

"I will give you a four-letter word," Calhoun told him.

"Coach, I've heard you use those before," Thabeet said.

"It's called W-O-R-K," Calhoun said, delivering each letter slowly. "I know you speak English well enough to understand that. It's not Swahili; this is English."

Thabeet thought he was being picked on until he realized Calhoun was only trying to make him a better player. After spending plenty of extra hours in the gym, working on his offense, Thabeet improved quickly.

"There was a lot of stuff I couldn't do that now I can," Thabeet says. Such as?

"A.J. will pass me the ball, and I'll catch it."

Thabeet still learning basketball

The last two years, Thabeet has been the Big East defensive player of the year. This season, he averaged 4.6 blocked shots a game and 10.9 rebounds. The defensive game-changer also scored 13.7 points a game and was voted Big East co-player of the year.

After Thabeet had 16 rebounds and seven blocks in a regular-season game against Syracuse last month, Orange coach Jim Boeheim said Thabeet was as good defensively as any other player he had seen in the Big East, a group that includes Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo.

With his sense of timing and quick feet, he has the ability to block shots without fouling. If teams get especially physical with Thabeet in the NCAA tournament, the Huskies could be in trouble. Still, Calhoun isn't worried. If Thabeet gets knocked around, he responds by blocking more shots.

Chattanooga coach John Shulman is not looking forward to facing Thabeet.

"He smiles all the time. I don't like that. He looks like he's having a little bit too much fun blocking everybody's shot," Shulman says.

Thabeet still has much to learn, especially when he needs to take over a game and score 25 points instead of 14, but the progress has been remarkable.

"I've watched him grow from a kid who couldn't make a layup to someone who will someday be a dominant force in the NBA," Calhoun says.

"I am so grateful," says Thabeet, projected to be a high first-round pick in this year's NBA draft if he declares, as expected. "He's a great teacher."

Beyond pro basketball, Thabeet's goal is to help kids in Africa, following in the footsteps of Mutombo and the NBA's Basketball Without Borders program. When Thabeet went home last summer, he ran into kids wearing UConn T-shirts.

"In the blink of an eye, everyone knows UConn," he says. His fans at home will follow the NCAA tournament on ESPN and on the Internet. His mother, Rukia, a businesswoman, is making the 23-plus hour trip this weekend in hopes of seeing her son in the Sweet 16. (His father, Thabit, an Oxford-educated architect, died five years ago.)

"He could be president there one day, the way people look up to him," Price says.

"He just has a way about him," Calhoun says. "As he's gained in stature basketball-wise, his head size has never changed."

The tall person became a basketball player and more.

Price's trials, tribulations

Calhoun can recite where he was on the highway headed to see a recruit in New York when the phone call arrived Oct. 4, 2004. Price had been hospitalized when a life-threatening condition, arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a defect of the circulatory system, caused bleeding in his brain. Price, from Amityville, N.Y., missed his freshman season while recovering.

At the time, Calhoun said it was the most trying ordeal in his three decades as a coach. Price nearly lost his life, then nearly fumbled away his basketball future that June when he was suspended for the 2005-06 academic year for his involvement in an on-campus incident involving stolen laptops.

"It was a self-inflicted wound after almost dying," Calhoun says.

"The trials and tribulations of A.J. It's been such a journey with him. We are always ending or starting something with him."

Now that the journey is ending, no one cried more on Senior Day last month than Price, surrounded by his father, Tony, who led Pennsylvania to the 1979 Final Four, and mother, Inga, who played basketball at Morgan State.

"It hit me when my name was announced," Price says. "I kept thinking about all the things I had been through." The fans cheered in return.

"He's a good kid who everybody roots for," Calhoun says.

Price had his finest season, leading the Huskies with 14.0 points and 4.7 assists a game.

"For the whole season, he's been the guy — really, the leader," Calhoun says.

After guard Jerome Dyson, the team's do-everything player, suffered a season-ending knee injury last month and the Huskies lost three of their final six games, Price gave more of himself, Calhoun says.

That was evident in the six-overtime loss to Syracuse last week in the quarterfinals of the Big East tournament. Price willed his team through 61 minutes with 33 points and 10 assists. When Price hugged Calhoun at the end of the night, the small gesture expressed the crushing disappointment both were feeling. "It was his way of saying, I know, we both kind of know," Calhoun says.

In the moments after the marathon, neither could appreciate the greatness of the game. All that mattered was that a shot at a championship was lost.

"I want them to have some badges on them. I want it for them, so it stung more," Calhoun says.

For Price, the feeling is mutual for the Hall of Fame coach who has won two national championships (1999, 2004) and 801 games and has battled skin cancer (twice) and prostate cancer successfully. And it's personal.

"This man has put his neck on the line numerous times for me, and that's something I will never forget," Price says. "We're doing everything we can — not just for ourselves and the team, but for Coach Calhoun, because he deserves it."

Price has long said he didn't want to be remembered only as the kid who got sick or as the kid who got in trouble. He wants to leave a legacy in those rafters.

"I want to be remembered as a guy who put a team on his back and helped bring a championship to Connecticut," Price says. "We really wanted a Big East championship, but the bigger goal is at hand. We need to seize this moment."