BBB in the middle of opkg upgrade, laptop connected via eth in putty locks up, unable to putty back

So, I was working through my initial setup on my new BeagleBone Black and was performing a “opkg upgrade”. Everything was working perfectly, until my lovely laptop decided it wanted to randomly disconnect from my network (I know this because I lost my work VPN connection too). After getting my laptop to reconnect to the network I tried to reconnect to my BBB via putty but it tells me “connection refused”. I can ping it just fine & I can also reach it via the USB webserver address (but I can’t putty into it either). Also, I am still able to see the GUI/desktop on the BBB itself when I connect a monitor.

My question is, does anyone know how I can reconnect to the BBB either putty, USB, or on the BBB’s desktop so I can go back to monitoring the “opkg upgrade” that was being performed before I became disconnected?