UConn is upset by Notre Dame in OT in the women's final four

Notre Dame advanced to Sunday’s championship game to face Mississippi State, which won its semifinal against Louisville in overtime.

The victory over UConn demonstrated a remarkable resilience by Notre Dame, whose thin roster is missing four players with torn anterior cruciate ligaments, a scourge of women’s sports.

Friday’s game became a fierce back-and-forth, one team making a determined run, the other answering, both overcoming deficits that expanded to double figures. And for a second consecutive year in the Final Four, UConn (36-1) felt the sting of defeat in the final seconds of overtime.

On Friday, the Huskies seemed finished near the end of regulation, trailing by 79-74 with 21.3 seconds left before Napheesa Collier (24 points) hit a 3-pointer, and Kia Nurse stole the inbounds pass and drove for a layup to tie the score, forcing five extra minutes.

In overtime, Notre Dame (34-3) drew ahead, but UConn responded. A 3-pointer by Crystal Dangerfield tied the score at 89-89 with 27 seconds left. Notre Dame called timeout with 13 seconds remaining and planned to isolate Ogunbowale (27 points) on the right wing and have her drive to the basket with about five seconds remaining, in the belief UConn would not try to foul.

But UConn’s defense made it difficult for Ogunbowale to get the ball as planned. Finally, with overtime about to expire, she shot from just inside the 3-point arc and hit nothing but net, giving Notre Dame its stirring victory. Jackie Young led the Irish with her career high of 32 points.

“I didn’t know it was going in, but it felt good,” Ogunbowale said.

Muffet McGraw, Notre Dame’s coach, acknowledged that the play, and ultimately the victory, had resulted more from improvisation than from design.

“I probably should thank every Catholic from coast to coast for all the prayers on Good Friday,” she said.

Importantly for the Irish, a deep familiarity with UConn had developed over the years, creating self-assurance and stonewashing any nervousness from their annual matchup in the regular season, and with regularity, another meeting in the tournament.

“They’re just another team,” guard Marina Mabrey said.

As partners in the old Big East Conference, the teams once played as many as four times a season. Their coaches — Notre Dame’s McGraw and UConn’s Geno Auriemma — obsessively followed each other’s performances. The rivalry became the most enthralling in women’s college basketball. It grew heated, sometimes to the point of bitterness.

Now they are in different leagues — the Irish play in the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Huskies in the American Athletic Conference — and the rivalry is less intense, but no less predictive of deep runs in the NCAA tournament. Notre Dame prevailed over UConn in the semifinals in 2001, when the Irish won their only national title, and did it again in 2011 and 2012, as well as on Friday.

For the second consecutive year, UConn failed to reach the championship game. Last year, defeat came on a stunning jumper by Mississippi State in overtime that snapped the Huskies’ 111-game winning streak. Again on Friday, the Huskies were left to contemplate going home empty-handed — despite having won 147 of their last 149 games.

“When you do something and it seems like it’s so effortless, you do get numb and forget it’s difficult,” Auriemma said of UConn’s raft of national titles. “It’s very difficult. There are no bad teams. There are no bad players. You can’t luck into a national championship. You have to play great.”

In these types of games, he continued, a necessary selfishness often prevails. One team often does not collectively beat another, he said. Instead, “there’s one or two players that just make unbelievable plays and just dominate the game.”

Women’s college basketball is now left to deliberate whether UConn’s stumble represented an anomaly or the hint of something larger — the beginning of a shift toward greater parity in the women’s game, which has developed on a track parallel to the men’s game.

The men’s NCAA tournament began in 1939, the women’s in 1982. In the first 37 years of the men’s tournament, coach John Wooden and UCLA won 10 titles. In the first 37 years of the women’s tournament, Auriemma and UConn have won 11 titles.

Will UConn’s dominance begin to fade, as UCLA’s did? It is far too early to tell, said coach Joanne P. McCallie of Duke, which lost to UConn in the semifinals of the Albany Region. UConn has signed the nation’s top recruit for next season, Christyn Williams, a 5-foot-11 guard from Arkansas. And Auriemma, who just turned 64, has hinted that he might coach until he is 70.

UConn is still the “king and queen and leader of the pack,” McCallie said. “Let’s look at the next four years. That will be the pattern to evaluate.”

Still, there is undeniable equalizing occurring in women’s college basketball.

Tennessee, an eight-time national champion, has not reached the Final Four since coach Pat Summitt retired and died from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. This season, Tennessee lost at home for the first time in the NCAA tournament. South Carolina, the 2017 champion, and Mississippi State, in the Final Four for a second consecutive season, have supplanted Tennessee as powers in the Southeastern Conference.

“Anytime you can show some parity in our game on any level, it’s always good,” said Dawn Staley, the South Carolina coach, who won the title last year. A leveling of the playing field “gives other coaches hope to keep on coaching.”

Oregon, UCLA and Oregon State have loosened the stranglehold that Stanford, a two-time champion and a Final Four regular, once had on the Pac-12 Conference. And two 11th seeds — Buffalo and Central Michigan — reached the round of 16 in the 2018 tournament.

Buffalo provided a shrewd example of the recruiting that mid-majors have undertaken to compete with opponents in the Power 5 conferences. Of Buffalo’s 14 players this season, seven were international — four from Australia, two from Canada and one from Nigeria.

“Women are not just saying, ‘I’m going to Connecticut’; they’re going everywhere now,” said Buffalo coach Felisha Legette-Jack. “My colleagues are not saying, ‘Come play for me because I’m at this school.’ They’re saying, ‘Come play with me because of this relationship I’m building with you.’ We’re not looking at buildings anymore; we’re looking at people.”

True parity in women’s college basketball may not arrive, McCallie said, until attendance is reliable enough during the early rounds of the NCAA tournament for all teams to play on neutral courts. For now, the top four seeds in each region are eligible to play the first and second rounds on their home courts.

“I think the only thing we have trouble with is where we play, the neutral court versus the home court, because we’ve got to draw fans,” McCallie said. “I think eventually that would be the next step.”

Before the tournament began, Auriemma urged a group of UConn fans to enjoy what the Huskies have accomplished, because “this isn’t going to last forever.”

Friday’s game, he said with gallows humor, was a “great learning tool.”

“But I’m a pretty smart guy,” he added. “I don’t need to learn this two years in a row.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.