The Hunt for the Most Interesting Team in the World is the Dagger's 2009-10 countdown preview series. Check out the overriding principles here.

Last year's record: 21-15, 8-10 Big East

2009-10's toughest games: at UConn, at Villanova, at Louisville, at Georgetown

Primary attraction: Luke Harangody's last hurrah.

Three items of undeniable interest:

1. Thanks, NBA. This offseason, Luke Harangody decided to give the NBA a shot. He didn't officially declare, and he didn't hire an agent; he merely showed up to a few camps, tested his mettle against the NBA's scouting darlings, and went on with his life. When it was clear Harangody wouldn't be drafted before the second round, if at all, he decided to come back to Notre Dame. So it is to those scouts, the ones who made it clear that Harangody wasn't an NBA player, that I'd like to briefly say: Thank you.

See, Harangody probably isn't a pro player. But he is a very good college one. He is a force on the offensive end (and has been for his entire career) and his per-possession rebounding statistics, especially on the defensive end, put him among the top rebounders in college hoops over the last decade. Harangody is very, very productive. Even if he weren't, though, Harangody viewers would still get to watch one of the strangest all-around styles any of us have seen for a long, long time. Harangody doesn't jump very high, and he isn't very fast. His scores come on jump shots and awkward fadeaways and, most often, on a kind of twisting reverse layup thing that looks like no shot you've ever seen before. If Luke Harangody stepped onto a pickup gym floor, people would laugh at him. And he would win almost every single time.

That we college hoops fans have the opportunity to revel in Harangody's awkward productivity for another year is almost entirely thanks to a few honest NBA scouts and draftniks. Thanks, guys.

2. Meet the new Big East, where things will be slightly less hectic. Last year's Big East was good. It probably wasn't quite worthy of the "best conference EVER!!11!1" accolades it received for much of the year, but there's no arguing that its top five or six teams were truly elite, and that no other conference in the country could match it for sheer depth of talent. Notre Dame got the sharp end of that conference slate in the middle of the season, when they played -- get this -- at Louisville, at Syracuse, Connecticut, Marquette, and at Pitt, all the matter of a couple weeks. After that, the Irish were pretty much spent.

Fortunately, this year's schedule is far easier, because this year's Big East is far less talented. There isn't a single stretch of games -- or, frankly, a game -- that really screams trouble. Unfortunately for Notre Dame, after losing Kyle McAlarney to graduation and Purdue transfer forward Scott Martin to a season-ending knee injury, Notre Dame isn't nearly as talented as they were last year. So perhaps the schedule doesn't matter after all.

3. Like the tielighter, Digger Phelps will never let this one go. When I was a freshman in college, I went to visit some friends at Notre Dame. We acquired basketball tickets. I was too busy turning my nose up the Joyce Center (it is really bad, so my elitism was at least founded in reality) to immediately notice that it was halftime and the lights had dimmed and a video was playing on the jumbo scoreboard at the end of the arena. Sure enough, it was a video of the final 3:22 of Notre Dame's 1974 win over UCLA, in which the Irish -- coached by Digger Phelps -- came back from 11 down in the last three minutes to hand John Wooden's No. 1 Bruins their first loss in 88 games. That was Notre Dame's best basketball moment ever, and it happened at the helm of someone who matches his tie to his highlighter when he goes on national television to talk about basketball. Sometimes, these things don'tneed to make sense.

Related: Big East Basketball, The Hunt