Bryant’s Ryan McLean, left, and the Bulldogs were unable to fend off Connecticut’s Kemba Walker and the No. 2 Huskies in Hartford yesterday.

AP / Fred Beckham

HARTFORD — Bryant University certainly isn’t weaning its way into its first year of Division I play.

Over the next month, the Bulldogs will face three Big East teams, a pair of ACC squads and a Big Ten foe, to boot. Never will the competition be any tougher than it was yesterday at the XL Center.

The five starters hit for double figures as second-ranked Connecticut rolled to an 88-58 win over Bryant before a somewhat moribund crowd of 12,558.

UConn junior center Hasheem Thabeet notched a double-double with 16 points and 12 rebounds, to go with 3 blocks. Thabeet’s six field goals were dunks. Of course, Thabeet stands at 7-foot-3, while Bryant’s tallest player is 6-7.

The Huskies outscored Bryant, 36-12, in the paint and 24-4 on second-chance points. And yet the outcome of the game hinged on just one bad call, joked first-year Bulldog coach Tim O’Shea.

“My good friend Max Good [the ex-Bryant coach] called me last night,” O’Shea revealed. “He wanted to remind me that one call cost me this game, and that was the phone call he made to schedule it. I got a good laugh out of that.”

O’Shea remained in a good mood, even after the 30-point loss, as his Bulldogs represented themselves well enough. Bryant hung tough over the first 10 minutes, thanks largely to the shooting of Cecil Gresham.

“This is, in many ways, a good thing for our program,” O’Shea said. “The positives for us: we put up 58 points against the number-two team in the country. We hung with them for about 13, 14 minutes … Obviously, from a talent standpoint, there’s an ocean between where Bryant is right now and where Connecticut is.”

Gresham, a Bloomfield, Conn. resident, led all scorers with 19 points (6-for-9 on 3-pointers), while Ryan McLean added 10 off the bench and Scituate’s Chris Birrell netted 9.

Bryant is in the first year of a four-year transition to Division I. It accepted membership into the Northeast Conference in October 2007, but won’t officially become the 12th member of the conference until 2012.

The Bulldogs have every NEC school on their schedule this year, however, and have defeated one of them — Quinnipiac University, 59-50, on Nov. 22 for their first D-I victory.