ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON last April, a group of UConn women’s basketball players texted back and forth about that evening’s party: what time they were leaving, what to wear, what the feel of the night would be. There was a spirited discussion about shoes. Few of them had ever been to a bat mitzvah before.
Dressed and ready, they caravaned out of campus with Paige Bueckers‘ car leading the way. When they arrived at the Jewish Community Center of West Hartford, Connecticut, about 40 minutes down the road, the festivities were in full swing. The Mexican food station was delectable. The centerpieces were brilliant. The line for the photo booth, where you could pose with assorted masks, feather boas and tiaras, was buzzing.
Even though UConn players are royalty in Connecticut — Bueckers is arguably the most famous athlete in the state — there was little fanfare. The bat mitzvah girl, Abby Zittoun, ran up to them with happiness and hugs, but also apologetically informed them she had to keep bouncing around so she could spend time with aunts and uncles and cousins and classmates and her other friends who had come that night, too.
The players nodded enthusiastically. They understood. This wasn’t an appearance or community event. There were no coaches present, no administrators from the UConn athletic department. There was no PR person or team photographer telling them they should play with the kids now. They were, like everyone else, simply there to celebrate someone special. They were guests. (Really, really tall guests.)
So, they played cornhole. They ate tacos. They barraged the photo booth and filled their Instagram stories. They cheered during musical chairs and the scavenger hunt. Azzi Fudd sat at a table with the grandparents and heard old family stories. When the DJ played the “Cha Cha Slide,” Bueckers hopped into the middle of a group stomping and kicking and laughing and shrieking. The “Cupid Shuffle” brought even bigger shouts. Abby’s mom, Gwen, whirled and spun. Even Caroline Ducharme, famously averse to dancing, joined in. You could hear Abby’s giggles in the parking lot.
No one talked about UConn’s brutal loss in the Final Four a week earlier. No one talked about the upcoming season or injury rehabs or pains from the past or challenges that might still be in front of them. For the players, for the Zittouns, for everyone at the party, it was that rarest of gifts: a night of joy, of glee, of bliss. A night when the delight of the moment is so pure that, just for a split second, it covers over everything else that makes life hard.
“We were there,” Bueckers says, “for Abby.”
WHAT CAN YOU SAY about a little girl who died young? That she had a smile for all time. That she cherished her family. And her dog. And musicals. That she built Legos to the ceiling. That she loved her friends fiercely. That they somehow loved her back even more.
Abby first connected with UConn through Evina Westbrook, a guard from Oregon who came to Connecticut via Tennessee. They met in February 2022, five years after Abby’s cancer diagnosis, during a post-practice event where the players spent time with patients from Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. It was sweet and meaningful — everyone took pictures and shot baskets, and a few of the kids perched on the players’ shoulders to get a little closer to the rim. It could have ended there — an inspiring afternoon and a great memory.
Except “Momma E,” as the team called Westbrook, wanted to know more about this girl in her group who had a “spicy” attitude. This girl with the beanie who was impossible to miss. Most kids the players met were big basketball fans who revered the Huskies and were sometimes shy or intimidated. But while Abby liked basketball and UConn just fine, she wasn’t the type to stand in awe.
“Let me teach you this dance,” said Abby, who was 10 at the time, and suddenly she and Westbrook were going through steps on the gym floor. They bantered about a shared love for Iron Man. They cackled. Abby had an affection for dad jokes that occasionally bordered on pun-comfortable, and while Westbrook can’t remember the exact joke Abby told her that day, one of her well-worn favorites — What is the leading cause of dry skin? Towels! — is “definitely possible.”
At one point, as Abby dribbled with one of the other players, Westbrook went over to Abby’s dad, Dan, who was standing on the side. Dan grew up in Connecticut, went to UConn in the 1990s and had a work-study job in UConn’s athletic department. He still remembers the laundry routine — take a jock strap, socks, shorts and a T-shirt, wrap it in a white towel, put it in a locker, then repeat for every single locker every single day — so just getting to see his daughter running around Gampel Pavilion was plenty. But then Westbrook, who was a senior, told him her family couldn’t come to many games because they were on the West Coast, so she’d be happy to give the Zittouns her allotted tickets some time. She said, “Abby is amazing.”
And then she asked, a little bit slower and a little bit more hesitantly, “So … what is she dealing with?”
DAN AND GWEN always wanted kids. They talked about it. They met in 2003, fell hard for each other, broke up because a long-distance relationship got tricky, then reconnected and fell all the way. One evening, when Gwen came into Dan’s apartment just before a date, she found him standing in front of one of the bedroom’s two closets. She looked closer and saw that the closet was cleaned out of his clothes, empty except for a single hanger with a new dress dangling from it. Gwen turned and Dan was on one knee.
Ella was born in 2009. Abby arrived 21 months later and Olivia came three years after that. Their life (and their minivan) was full. It is an undeniable truth that big families feel different: With all that chaos and noise, it’s like the cabling and wires beneath the surface have to be even stronger. The Zittouns were a clan, a pack, a force — dinners didn’t often finish with all five still at the table, but only because at least one person usually left to avoid choking from laughing too hard.
The girls were best friends and Abby was the motor. Once, while eating at Burger King on a road trip, they admired the paper crowns on display behind the counter. Dan suggested that Ella, the eldest, go up and ask the man at the register for one. Ella didn’t want to go — she loved the crown but was fine with letting the opportunity pass.
Abby wasn’t. She stood up, marched to the front, talked to the man at the register and returned moments later. She had three crowns. The girls wore them in the car.
“She’s a little firecracker,” Gwen says. “She had ringlet hair, really curly hair, and it just fit her personality: smiley, happy, the one to raise her hand. She wants to help, she wants to participate, she wants to be involved.”
Then came Friday, Oct. 6, 2017. The family was supposed to fly to Florida that evening for a wedding. Gwen took Abby to the ophthalmologist because her right eye had started wobbling — sometimes it looked as if she was going cross-eyed. Gwen and Dan were worried it was something with her retina and wanted to get it checked before they left.
After dilating Abby — no easy task with a 6-year-old — the ophthalmologist grew visibly concerned. She started talking about pressure. Something was pushing on Abby’s eye. They needed to go to the emergency room, she told Gwen. Like, right now.
Dan met them at the hospital. Doctors and nurses came and went. Tests were done. Scans. Examinations. That night, and the next few weeks really, slipped into a frenzied blur for Dan and Gwen, a hazy tapestry of waiting rooms and hushed conversations and questions asked and answers not quite given that was spattered with a few searing moments of clarity — details and fragments, of varying importance, that they’ll never forget.
The mass in Abby’s skull was the size of a plum. The show “PJ Masks” was on an endless loop as they waited that first night, and the theme song was catchy but annoying. They didn’t know how to tell everyone in Florida that they weren’t coming to the wedding. A kind doctor sat with them on the floor of the hospital and gave them the mantra they would cling to: “Just be in the place where you are. Other people in your life are going to be 500 steps down the road. Just be in the place you are.”
At some point in those early stages, as they were still learning about neuroblastoma, Dan and Gwen made a pact: No matter how tough it got, they would never have a simultaneous breakdown. Tears, anger, rage, desperation — it was all allowed, they said. Melting down was perfectly acceptable. Just not together. That way, there was always one person who could hug the other and say, with whatever assuredness was summonable, that they could and would get through this.
“We never fell apart at the same time,” Dan says. “There were so many times we could have. … But we would say, ‘Hey: They need us.'”
DAN DIDN’T GIVE Westbrook all those details that day at Gampel, of course. He didn’t go in-depth about the initial craniotomy and all the surgeries that followed. Or the endless chemotherapy and how Abby wanted to dye her hair before it fell out so Gwen dyed hers, too, and was, for a time, the mom with pink hair.
He didn’t go line by line on all the places they went for treatments, all the doctors they talked to in Connecticut and Boston and New York and Philadelphia, or all the papers they read and trials they considered. He didn’t list all the apartments and Ronald McDonald House rooms they slept in or all the times that he and Gwen drove home early (or late) to switch out so that someone was always there for Ella and Olivia. He didn’t describe the brutal, gut-wrenching cancer yo-yo — how Abby was “cancer-free” and then it was back and then it was somewhere else and then it was gone and then it was back, this thin, fluttering, tantalizing thread of normalcy that would sway right in front of them only to vanish again without mercy. There were four relapses in seven years.
No one can ever really understand it all because only those living it are there for everything. Every single ride to the hospital. Every injection. Every Friday when a test result doesn’t come back and you have to wait until Monday. The port being put in and taken out and put in. The crushing guilt over enjoying something — a beer, a book, anything — when you know your daughter is in pain. The anguish of trying to sleep when your baby has something wrong with her and there is nothing you can do to fix it.
“Abby would tell me, ‘Don’t cry,'” Dan says. “She would say it all the time. Finally, I pushed back. I was like, ‘I can cry sometimes.’ And she got OK with it.”
The Zittouns were open; they shared plenty with their community about what was happening because they knew how many people cared. But a single phone call or Facebook post or update is a little like trying to grasp a 20-volume encyclopedia by pulling out a single page. There may be no greater gap in the English language than the space between what it’s like to simply read the words, “During MIBG therapy, Abby spent five days quarantined in a hospital room,” and understanding what it actually means to be there, sitting in a lead-lined anteroom outside a locked door for 120 hours as your 8-year-old child’s tiny body is pumped full of radiation, unable to hold her hand or hug her or whisper in her ear that she’s safe.
How do you explain that to someone? How do you explain what the hair on the back of your neck does when you’re the dad, the one who is supposed to have the answers to everything in the world, and you’re walking in a parking lot one day and one of your children quietly asks you, “Is Abby going to live?”
You don’t explain it. You can’t. So that day at Gampel, Dan just gave Westbrook the broad strokes of all Abby had been through and talked more about how she’d faced it — with the resilience and strength and commitment to the present that Westbrook had already seen.
He told her that their family looked at what was in front of them and, given a choice on how to proceed, chose joy. He told her that they were busy, were active, were always pushing and looking forward. That Gwen, the family’s unbreakable rock, constantly went places with Abby and made plans with Abby, always finding something — anything — on weekends or vacations or on days Abby couldn’t go to school because they learned, very quickly, that she was the best version of herself when she could do things and see things and try things and be things. They all were.
“It takes her mind off it,” Gwen says. “That’s really why she was happy, because she wasn’t thinking about things all the time. … We’re going to do this thing today and that thing today, and we’re going to be together today. And that’s how we got through a lot of the days.”
Walks in the woods. Treasure hunts. Disney. Broadway. So many parks and playgrounds. And a few weeks after meeting Westbrook, the UConn-Mercer first-round NCAA tournament game at Gampel.
After the game, which UConn won in a blowout, Westbrook looked at the crowd waiting to see the players and pointed at Abby, waving her over. “I wanted to talk to her again,” Westbrook says, “because she was so fun.” Abby sat with Westbrook and Nika Muhl, and they watched part of the second game of the doubleheader while chatting with a slew of others, including three younger players with whom Westbrook was especially close:
Bueckers, Fudd and Ducharme.
NO ONE IS exactly sure when Abby and Westbrook exchanged numbers and started texting. Or when, exactly, Westbrook’s teammates asked for Abby’s number so they could text with her, too.
It just happened the way any connection does. Solo texts became group texts and group texts became side texts, and suddenly there were moments when Abby would just casually mention an injury that Westbrook was dealing with in the WNBA or ask Gwen, offhandedly, “Do we have any plans on Monday? Because I invited Paige and Azzi over for dinner.”
The games remained a tether, absolutely. Abby loved being there, particularly at the end when she would go on the court carrying a bag of mini-basketballs. She would hug the players and joke with them and hand out the mini-basketballs for them to toss to the fans in the stands. She held the bag with pride. It was a job she took seriously.
But these are members of Gen Z and so, naturally, the phone was where everything truly grew. There was nothing forced in it, no obligation on either side — neither UConn coach Geno Auriemma nor Dan and Gwen were involved with any of the relationships being made. And that absence of parents or coaches or doctors, the ones usually exerting control over so much of their lives, only made Abby and the players feel freer. “I texted her like she was my little sister,” Ducharme says.
Each thread built on its own. Bueckers became fascinated with doing Legos, so she and Abby would share photos of their projects. Fudd and Abby had an animated and long-running debate over whether the proper color for mint chocolate chip ice cream was white (Fudd) or green (Abby). Ducharme, who is from outside Boston, could talk with Abby about two New England classics: the Celtics and “Gilmore Girls.”
Everyone checked in on each other, made fun of each other, raised each other up. Abby vented about friendship dynamics in middle school and how math class was excruciating (Bueckers, supportively: “Math is the worst.”). The players complained about a hard practice or the challenge of a rehab visit, and Abby would send a funny meme or a heart or an image of the Zittouns’ dog, Cooper, who is a very good boy. Pictures of candy, in all its formations and constructions, were always welcome with no segue needed.
There were, occasionally, moments when the conversation shifted to basketball or cancer, but like any real text thread, the swings were sudden and erratic: Making fun of Westbrook for not liking TikTok could be interrupted by a quick praise of Bueckers’ shooting; on one day, Abby might write “PS now I have spine and brain cancer” (followed by the speechless emoji, the eyeroll emoji and the single tear emoji), while other days there might be a lengthy discourse between Westbrook, Ducharme and Abby that started with a discussion of blue cheese vs. ranch dressing but then somehow veered into a discourse on the best kind of bug. (Abby, inquisitively: “Does a butterfly count?” Westbrook, authoritatively: “Yes. Great answer.”)
Once, when the Zittouns were on vacation in Vermont, Gwen and Dan came back to their rental house after a quick walk and found Abby in the middle of an impromptu three-way FaceTime with Westbrook and Ducharme. (“We needed to catch up,” Ducharme says.) Fudd came over to the Zittouns’ house one day last year, rang the doorbell and surprised Abby, who nearly exploded with delight and wrapped Fudd in a bearhug before they spent the afternoon playing with Cooper and engaging in a heated battle of Cards Against Humanity.
When Bueckers and Fudd were part of a group that came for dinner another night, Abby shared some of her preferred jokes (another classic: What do you call a porcupine in summer? A porcupine!) and performed for them her famous card trick, where she lays out 21 cards on a table and — with her magical powers — correctly picks the one her subject selects. “She got me on that one,” Bueckers says. “It’s impressive.” Afterward, Abby led the players upstairs so they could hang in her room, telling Gwen, politely, “You can stay down here.”
“They just treated Abby like Abby,” Gwen says. “It was just about letting her be her. And I think the beauty of the relationship was that she treated them that way, too — that they were just friends who happened to be, like, superstar basketball players.”
The connection between Abby and Ducharme might have run the deepest. A highly recruited shooting guard, Ducharme has played in just four games over the past two seasons because of a series of medical issues, including head and neck injuries and a concussion. She has spent long stretches of time away from the team for different treatments.
It was common ground. She and Abby were honest with each other, were open about what it’s like to constantly miss out on things that, if not for your own body’s refusal, you’d be doing too. Ducharme once visited Abby in the hospital on a treatment day when Abby was in pain and tired and frustrated. Ducharme expected they would play a game or chat like usual, but as soon as she walked through the door, Abby looked up, saw her friend and burst into tears. She buried her head in Ducharme’s lap.
“She always put on this brave face,” Ducharme says. “And this was the first time I really saw her struggle. … I think I brought her hot chocolate, which was one of her favorites, and a little bracelet-making kit. And I was, like, ‘Do you want to do anything? You want the hot chocolate?’ And she was like, ‘No, I just want to lay here.'”
There was a vulnerability between them, a tenderness. They made picture boxes for each other to keep in their rooms when they were away. They crafted. In the days before Ducharme headed to Florida for treatments last March, Abby texted Bueckers and other players asking what sweets Ducharme preferred. (Bueckers, without hesitation: “Laffy Taffy, Twizzlers, Swedish fish, sparkling water ice drinks, York, Pringles, Mamba candies.”)
Abby gathered all her intel. And even as she was prepping to travel to Pennsylvania for her own treatment, she put together a bag for Ducharme to take on the road. She packed it full of activities to do and photos to look at and snacks to eat. She put a handwritten letter inside.
“I really hope everything goes well,” she wrote near the bottom, her playful signature always including two hearts beside her name. “I love you so much,” she signed. “Love, Abby.”
LIKE MANY UCONN fans, Dan booked the hotel at the start of last season: Cleveland, Final Four weekend. Just in case.
He knew, even back in the fall when he made the reservation, it was unlikely they’d be able to go. Treatments, travel — everything had gotten a little tougher. Abby’s situation wasn’t improving the way anyone wanted. By January, when UConn literally struggled to field a team some nights because so many players were out injured, it looked like the Huskies had little chance to make it there anyway. Dan almost canceled the hotel a half-dozen times.
Except UConn did make it. And when Carley Mooney, a do-it-all staffer for UConn who helps the players with just about everything and has also become close with the Zittouns, called to let Gwen and Dan know that the team had two tickets for them if they could get to Cleveland, a decision had to be made.
They had been at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia all week as Abby had her T-cells harvested for a potential future treatment. They were exhausted. She was exhausted. Her bat mitzvah, already moved a few different times, was a week later. Was it too much? Was it worth it? Was it even safe for her to be around so many people?
“We asked, ‘Is it OK for her to be in an arena with 20,000 people?'” Dan says. “And they were like, ‘She should be fine …’ and I said, ‘Great, stop [talking].’ That’s it.'”
On Thursday, Abby had surgery to put a catheter in her neck, then spent four hours having her T-cells removed and the catheter taken out. On Friday morning, Gwen flew home, and Dan and Abby got in the car. Tipoff was at 9 p.m. and they were 430 miles away. They passed Hershey and Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Gibsonia and Youngstown as the sun rose and peaked and fell.
Abby’s playlist powered them. “Hamilton.” “Wicked.” Olivia Rodrigo. They talked about the team. About the summer. About Cooper, who really is a very good boy. They laughed. They were a father and a daughter on a road trip, racing the clock. After a hurried bathroom break at a rest stop, Dan handed something to Abby as they returned to the parking lot.
A Burger King crown. She wore it in the car.
They made it to Cleveland with just enough time for a short snooze and a slice of pizza. In the arena that night, Abby screamed and cheered and shouted as UConn and Iowa battled. She jumped up when Muhl hit a 3-pointer to pull the Huskies close near the end. She dropped when an official made a controversial call on Aaliyah Edwards and UConn lost by two. She stared as Caitlin Clark and her teammates celebrated. In the frenzy and disappointment after the game, Abby couldn’t visit with the players, but there were many texts.
The next day, as Dan made the long, winding drive through rain and snow back to Connecticut, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw Abby smiling at him. The end of the game, the referee’s call — it stunk. But in a life full of regimented treatment plans and scheduled check-ins and restrictions on what to eat because there is this procedure or that infusion coming on precisely this day, they had thrown away the rules. They’d done something spontaneous, done something unexpected. Abby loved it.
“I would have driven to California,” Dan says.
THROUGH THE SUMMER and into this past fall, Abby’s treatments became less frequent. There wasn’t as much they could do, the doctors said. There weren’t as many things they could try.
Abby was tired more often but didn’t buckle. When Muhl came to Connecticut with her WNBA team in September, the Zittouns went to the game. Even though it was a little too frenetic in the arena for Abby, they spent time afterward with the UConn players who came to see their former teammate. A fan even asked Ella for an autograph, assuming she was a player, too.
Still, the text threads never wavered. Abby shared early impressions of 8th grade and pictures of the 5,201-piece Lego Avengers Tower that was her favorite build yet. The players checked in with updates on their prep for the season that was fast approaching. On Sept. 27, Abby and Ducharme discussed making plans for dinner; on Sept. 29, Abby sent birthday wishes to Westbrook and they traded emojis.
On Sept. 30, Abby went to school and had a choir audition that she said went pretty well. It was Gwen’s birthday, and Dan came home early from work so they could celebrate. But that night, Abby became nauseous and complained of a searing headache. They rushed to the hospital.
The next morning, after the UConn players finished a preseason workout, Mooney called them over. She told them she had heard from the Zittouns and it wasn’t good: There had been a brain bleed. Abby wasn’t conscious.
Ducharme sobbed. The players went into their locker room and held each other. They stayed there and wept together. “The silence in the room,” Fudd says, “was very loud.” Ducharme remembers locking eyes with Bueckers and sensing that both felt the same thing: “We have to go see her. We have to go see her.”
They went the next morning. “It was definitely scary,” Bueckers says. They didn’t know what it would look like in that room or feel like in that room. They just knew they wanted to be there.
Bueckers, Fudd, Ducharme and Aubrey Griffin — the seniors, along with Mooney — drove into Hartford and took the hospital elevator to the eighth floor. Gwen and Dan met them near the nurse’s station, then brought them into a room next door to Abby’s. They hugged. They prayed. Gwen and Dan told the players that Abby could hear them even if she wasn’t responsive. Then they opened the door to Abby’s room so the players could be alone with her.
“It’s what comes when you love someone — you’re going to be with them in that moment,” Mooney says. “And that’s what they did.”
The players sat by Abby’s bed. They held her hand. They rubbed her back. They talked about how practice was going. They read cards to her, messages written by every player on the team.
Fudd drew hearts of all different colors on the front of hers but inked the words on the inside in purple.
“I hope one day I can be as amazing as you are,” she read to Abby.
“That said, Cooper is still my favorite,” she continued.
“Your smile is one of my favorite things because it is so contagious but the way you carry yourself is something I look up to.”
They went through each one. The car ride back to campus was quiet. “Just getting to share one more moment with her was special,” Fudd says. “I’m super grateful they let us have that.”
Over the next two weeks, Gwen and Dan barely left the hospital, never slept anywhere but the tiny couch wedged into the corner by the window. The players tried to go about their routines with school and practice, but Mooney says it was obvious how much they were struggling because “a huge piece of them was with Abby.” They asked for updates constantly, even as it became clear there weren’t many coming. Remembering what they’d been told about how Abby could hear them, they recorded videos of themselves talking to Abby and sent them to Gwen and Dan.
“Haven’t had a practice like that since sophomore year,” Bueckers told Abby in one video. “We have a lot to learn.
“I know you’d have a lot to say — constructive criticism, which we need!” she said. “We love you.”
On Oct. 15, Abby died. She was 13. Bueckers says the players stayed in the locker room for hours. Talking. Looking at the text threads. Weeping. “Paige and I called Evina,” Ducharme says. “I was a mess telling her. I was bawling.”
The memorial service — the celebration of life — was held at Beth El Temple, a synagogue in West Hartford. There was a murmur when the UConn team walked into the overflowing sanctuary, but the players settled quietly into their seats. This wasn’t an appearance; they were, like everyone else, just there to grieve. They were mourners. (Really, really tall mourners.)
The rabbi quoted Abby, who months earlier had stood on the same pulpit at her bat mitzvah and taught a lesson from the Bible about “the importance of finding strength when we are challenged.” Ella and Olivia, with incredible grace, spoke of Abby’s humor and her love of breakfast, and shared a story from when they were little and Ella cut Abby’s hair. (It wasn’t great.) Gwen talked about Cooper, who always seemed to know when Abby was struggling and lay protectively at her feet until just days before she died. Dan referenced one of Abby’s favorite songs from “Rent” — the one that suggests that while most people think of lives in terms of days or months or years, the greater quantity — the best quantity — might be to measure the love.
When it was their turn, the UConn seniors stood together at the lectern. Ducharme spoke of Abby’s beloved Jayson Tatum sneakers and the crafts they made and the kisses they’d blow each other before games. “I never thought this sweet little girl with such an infectious smile would change my life in the way that she did,” she said.
Bueckers mentioned the Legos and the dinners and the card trick — Abby never did share with anyone how she did it. “From the first day we met, we all knew the bond was going to be something special,” Bueckers said.
She looked out at the audience.
“Abby lives within all of us.”
IN MID-DECEMBER, during UConn’s game against USC, there was a moment when a USC player ran down the court, in position to make a play, only to trip and fall out of nowhere. There was no one around her, no obvious reason for her slip, but down she went.
Watching, Fudd had an immediate sensation: Abby.
“Like — thank you,” she thought.
The memories, the twinges, the feelings come at different times and in different ways. The littlest things hit hardest. An opponent’s unexpected stumble, sure. A ball hanging on the rim and falling off. But also, a segment about dad jokes on the radio. For Bueckers, it’s when she works on her Lego project, a build of the house from the movie “Despicable Me.” For Gwen, it’s when she shops for groceries without Abby taking part of the list or when she calls a restaurant to make a reservation and the host says, “How many in your party?”
The Zittouns still go to the UConn games. How could they not? They feel comfortable there, feel warm there, feel happy there. At the start of the season, Dan made a hotel reservation for this year’s Final Four in Tampa.
On Feb. 2, when the Huskies played Butler at the XL Center in Hartford, the players and coaches came out for warm-ups wearing black shooting shirts that had the signature from Ducharme’s card — “Love, Abby,” with the two hearts — across the chest. During a timeout, Dan, Gwen, Ella and Olivia went on the court and received an ovation from the crowd, a framed photo collage of Abby with the players and a $10,000 check from Auriemma for the Abigail Zittoun Family Foundation. The arena DJ played songs from Abby’s Spotify playlist all afternoon.
They were grand gestures, lovely public tributes to a connection that endured. But for the Zittouns — and for the players, too — the quieter parts mattered just as much.
The video explaining to the crowd how much UConn cared for Abby was voiced by Ducharme. The quote inscribed beneath the photo montage — “Because we knew you, we’ve been changed for good” — was inspired by Abby’s favorite song from “Wicked.” And the bouquet of flowers the Zittouns received wasn’t made of flowers at all. It was a bouquet of Legos; Bueckers and Fudd built it together.
“It was,” Bueckers says, “an unconditional love.”
Near the end of the game, Mooney had the plastic bag full of mini-basketballs ready — the bag Abby used to hold. When the final buzzer sounded, Ella and Olivia took the bag and marched on to the court.
Standing at their seats, Dan and Gwen watched, just like before. They saw the players laughing with their children, high-fiving their children, hollering with their children. They saw delight. They saw joy.
Fudd hugged Olivia. Ducharme wrapped an arm around Ella’s shoulder. Bueckers bounded over and Abby’s sisters opened the bag. The brightest lights might burn out the fastest, but their glow is unforgettable. Bueckers took a handful of mini-basketballs, stepped toward the baseline and lofted them up into the crowd.
