TAMPA — The Connecticut Huskies do not cut down nets when other programs cut down nets. They do not climb ladders when they win a conference tournament. No one touches scissors when they make the Final Four. The players understand the standard when they commit: Play somewhere else if you want to cut down a net for anything less than a national title. This is a place where success is measured only in championships.
Which meant that on Sunday afternoon at Amalie Arena, after they played a smooth, confident 40 minutes, after they beat the South Carolina Gamecocks by a score of 82–59, after the confetti had fallen, UConn’s players looked a bit uncharacteristically lost.
Theirs is a program ethos built on the idea of acting like one has been here before. Players are coached to embody that in all they do—in their playmaking, in their body language, in their media obligations. It is rare to catch any of them looking adrift. Yet that finally changed when it was time for this group to cut down the net. There was no escaping the obvious.
These players really had never been here before.
Some were a tad wobbly on the ladder. Not everyone knew which direction to look for the customary photographs. A few asked exactly which part of nylon to snip.
While championships are the expectation at UConn, this is a group of players for whom that experience had been completely, agonizingly elusive for the last few years. It has generally been rare for graduating classes to leave without a title since the program won its first under head coach Geno Auriemma and his associate Chris Dailey in 1995. But that changed over the last nine years. In a shifting college game, while facing a brutal series of injuries and bad luck, UConn experienced its longest title drought since it began winning championships.
That finally ended on Sunday. After those years of waiting—lost seasons, torn ligaments, bonds forged over days spent by hospital beds as much as nights spent on the court—UConn did not waste any time. The best team in the country was led by its best players to play its best basketball. Dynamic forward Sarah Strong broke a freshman championship scoring record. Azzi Fudd opened with a dominant first half. Paige Bueckers, the face, heart and drive of this group, the redshirt senior who has led their every push while absorbing their every loss, did everything she had to do. UConn never trailed after the opening minutes of the first quarter and was up by 20 before the start of the fourth.
“I just kept thinking, something good has to happen, because if we were going to lose, it would have been before now,” Auriemma said. “I don’t think the basketball gods would take us all the way to the end—they’ve been really cruel with some of the kids on this team. They’ve suffered a lot of the things that could go wrong in their college careers as an athlete. So they don’t need any more heartbreak. So they weren’t going to take us here and give us more heartbreak. I kept holding on to that. I’m glad they were rewarded.”
So they climbed the ladder, a bit clumsy and unrefined, to somewhere they had never been.
Auriemma coaches in a state of perpetual annoyance. His assistants will cheer and give words of encouragement. He will generally limit his own expressions of positivity to brief nods of acknowledgment. The veteran coach offers plenty of emotion on the sideline. But that rarely involves anything that might read as “joy.” He sighs. He grimaces. He throws his arms up and demands to know what the hell a person was thinking. (It makes little difference if the person in question is a referee or his own player.) When he claps, it feels not like excitement, but like a matter of catharsis. UConn can be up by 50. Auriemma will appear to be enduring the win rather than enjoying it. To watch him coach is to wonder if the man has ever felt satisfied with anything.
It’s a dynamic that is both reason for and product of the fact that playing at UConn is like playing nowhere else in the NCAA. There are other programs with high standards and rich legacies. There are none that has combined those in such a remarkable way that its name has become shorthand for success itself. UConn women’s basketball stands alone.
That does not feel any less weighty through nine years of a championship drought. And that is largely because of the environment cultivated by Auriemma.
It has been 40 years since he took over in Storrs. College basketball isn’t what it was then, and teenagers aren’t, either. Auriemma has adapted by necessity. (He points to a favorite quote from the novel A Gentleman in Moscow: “It is the business of the times to change ... And it is the business of gentlemen to change with them.”) But he’s never compromised on what he finds most important. “I’ve not given up what I believe in and how I think things should be done and what my standards are and what my beliefs are in terms of how to get to those standards. That hasn’t changed,” he said. “And what kind of kid I want.” Those kids know all of that from the jump: No one has ever accused Auriemma of being anything less than brutally honest. But that does not make learning to play for him any easier.
“As a freshman, I was terrified of him,” says Huskies sophomore guard Ashlynn Shade. “I really cared what he said, what he thought, everything that came out of his mouth. I took it very personal.”
There is no one in college basketball who has won as much as Auriemma. Which means there is no one in college basketball who takes winning for granted less.
Auriemma will always spot a way to make something better. He will always let his team know exactly what that is and why and demand they start doing it now. (Players from the 1995 championship team have a story about someone putting on a replay of their big win during their victory party. Their coach started breaking it apart like a film session. And that was his first title.) If he’s changed over the last 40 years, he certainly has not added much in the way of being soft and fuzzy.
“I wasn’t really sure: Does he like me? Does he not like me?” says redshirt freshman center Jana El Alfy. “But then as games went by, I understood, if he didn’t yell at you, if he didn’t get on you, that means he doesn’t like you. When he started being hard on me and challenging me, I understood that he saw something in me.”
That is not a dynamic that works for every player. But for those it does, it works very, very well. They all come to a similar conclusion: Auriemma picks at them and seizes on their mistakes and demands they do more because he believes they are capable of it. And he also genuinely cares about them.
Near the end of her freshman season, at Auriemma’s 70th birthday party last year, Shade got up and said, “Every day, Coach tells me how bad I am, how unaware I am defensively, how I get everything wrong every time, and that he thinks I’m terrible. But I know that’s just his way of saying he loves me.” The man she was terrified of at the beginning of the year had become one she could joke about in front of the whole locker room.
“I would give everything for him,” Shade says. “I would lay my body on the line for him any time I step on the court, and I think he knows that, and he would do the same for me. And that’s just something very special.”
Or as put by his star:
“He doesn’t like you and he hates coaching you and you’re the worst thing that ever happened,” Bueckers said. “He’s a little bit delusional and exaggeration-prone. You know all these things he’s saying, he doesn’t really mean it, but his belief and his confidence and his trust in me, and how much he holds me accountable for all the things that you didn’t even know was important, I think nobody has a better feel.”
Auriemma has fostered this kind of relationship with dozens of players over decades. Few have clicked with him so obviously as Bueckers. She came into UConn with the same decorated pedigree as several of its best players before her: No. 1 prospect, teenager already long deemed a generational talent, Gatorade High School Female Athlete of the Year. She needed virtually no adjustment period. Bueckers became the first freshman to be named national player of the year. She also became the first freshman to gain notice for slapping Auriemma on the butt in the middle of an NCAA tournament game.
(The coach had spent practice ragging on Anna Makurat, then a guard for the Huskies, and when she hit a crucial three, Bueckers saw an opportunity to get Auriemma back. “He gives us a lot of smoke,” she said. “It’s nice to dish it back sometimes.” Even as a freshman, Bueckers did not see his yelling as personal or cruel or too much. She saw it as the opening move of a game that she wanted to win.)
The summer before she enrolled at UConn, Bueckers told Sports Illustrated that her goal was to win four national championships in four years, just like two-time WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart did as a Husky. (“You have to have a little bit of cockiness,” Auriemma said when the quote was read back to him. “She’s got just enough of it.”) But her transcendent freshman year ended with a loss in the Final Four. Everything got more difficult after that.
Bueckers missed half of her sophomore year with a knee injury. She returned for the end of the season, pushing a battered roster into the national championship game, but the Huskies were blown out by a dominant South Carolina team. A few months later, Bueckers tore her ACL in a pickup game. The next season was swallowed by the recovery process, and with her on the sideline, UConn missed the Final Four for the first time in a decade and a half. And when she was finally healthy the following year, many of her teammates were not, including Bueckers’s longtime close friend and former top recruit Fudd, who had torn her own ACL. It felt like a small miracle that UConn’s season lasted as long as the Final Four. It lasted no longer.
Which led here. Bueckers entered this season a redshirt senior, fully healthy and confident in her body again, still in search of a title. Even through her injuries, she had compiled one of the most prolific, well-rounded careers in the history of the storied program. She had grown in ways she could not have originally imagined. “I was a person who just loved to tie their shoes and get on the court and play,” Bueckers said of herself as a teenager. She had come to understand how much she needed to do to make that happen. She prioritized nutrition, sleep and recovery. Bueckers had learned how little she could take for granted. “I feel like with everything she’s been through, she’s learned there’s a purpose behind every single thing,” Fudd says. Bueckers had developed as a player and leader and person alike. But she’d never climbed a ladder and cut down a net.
She knew this season would be her last chance. (Though she has a remaining year of eligibility, 23-year-old Bueckers was clear that she was ready to move on to the WNBA, where she is the presumptive No. 1 draft pick.) She also knew it would be her best one.
This roster was collectively healthier than it had been in years. It was also better and deeper.
A very good season became a great one. UConn was not perfect: It lost to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the USC Trojans in December, and most frustratingly, to its old rival Tennessee Volunteers in February. But it got better after each defeat. (“Coming off that loss at Tennessee, we kind of really, really locked in on practices,” Fudd says. “You could feel just a shift in kind of the intensity.”) The Huskies were far more balanced than had been the case in recent years. With a healthy Fudd and the addition of freshman phenom Strong, they did not place such a heavy load on Bueckers, and she took fewer shots and scored less than she had in any full, healthy season of her career previously.
This suited Bueckers. For all her talent, she had always been rather unshowy, defined by her efficiency rather than her flashiness. Yet as UConn barreled toward the NCAA tournament for her last chance at a title, she tapped into something else.
“Little by little, it’s dawned on her, I think,” Auriemma said. “There is no ‘next year.’ There is no, you know, ‘I can get this any time I want.’ You’re going to have to get it now or it won’t be available anymore.”
Bueckers began playing like she internalized what that meant. For her last home game at Gampel Pavilion, in the second round, she scored 34. Next, facing the Oklahoma Sooners in the Sweet 16, she broke a UConn record by putting up 40. And in the Elite Eight, she kept going apace, finishing with 31. It was a run that no other player ever managed in the history of the program. She did it en route to the Final Four.
“Obviously there’s more of a sense of urgency,” says Huskies redshirt junior Caroline Ducharme. “But I don’t think it’s necessarily changed in her being super tense or anything like that. I don’t think she’s feeling it that way.”
Bueckers was playing urgently without playing tight. She was playing free.
“She’s in an incredible place right now mentally,” Fudd said in the middle of that run. “I think she’s somewhere that she’s kind of untouchable in a sense.”
And the game that followed that stretch was remarkable in a different way. UConn’s Final Four matchup with the No. 1 overall seed UCLA Bruins was not defined by Bueckers. It was defined instead by what the roster did as a group. UConn’s defense was in sync from the start in a way that was almost mesmerizing, switching and diving and foreclosing opportunities, and its offense flowed out from that. The Huskies won, 85–51, in the largest margin of victory ever in the Final Four. Their coach began his news conference with something uncharacteristic.
“I have to say that this was somewhat unexpected,” Auriemma said. “I don’t think we made a mistake the entire evening, especially on the defensive end … I’m really humbled by their performance tonight.”
That is not the standard for a coach who is known for his constant sense of frustration, who nitpicks championship replays, who has made a career of figuring out how to get under the skin of the game’s best players in order to make them even better. It was not something that his players had ever heard before. And given a chance to reflect the next day, after a chance to consider the film, he stood by it.
“I never said that before, I don’t think, of any of the teams I’ve brought here, and I brought some great teams,” Auriemma said. “The goals that we set for ourselves, this is what we’re going to do, they completely bought into that, completely did it in a way that I would say—How could we do that better? And I don’t know that we could. Every decision that we wanted them to make, they came as close to getting that many right as they possibly could ... Yeah. That was pretty special.”
UConn did not play quite so close to perfect in the national championship game against South Carolina. But it did not have to. The Huskies looked like the better, more cohesive team from the jump, and that was enough.
“They flat-out beat us,” South Carolina coach Dawn Staley said. “Because we tried to throw a lot at them, and they rose above it, they rose above it all. That’s what happens when you have super-talented players like that.”
It was the reverse of what happened when these programs met in the national championship game in 2022. That game was all South Carolina from the start, and the Gamecocks won, 64–49. The only Husky to score in double figures was Bueckers. Even now, three years later, Fudd thinks of that game and remembers it as something from a nightmare.
“The only thing I remember from that game is feeling like I couldn’t move, and then seeing Paige, doing everything,” she says. “It was like Paige was the only one there—I mean, no, everyone was there—but I felt like she was trying to carry us on her own, and she did what she could. But that was a really, really tough South Carolina team, and she couldn’t do it on her own, and there wasn’t enough of us there to help her.”
Bueckers might have stood a better chance of doing it on her own in this one. But this group made sure that she never needed to. Strong dominated both inside and out. Fudd drove and slashed and floated to the basket. Shade delivered the most emotional basket of the night with a dagger of a three at the end of the first half.
It was a perfectly capable performance by Bueckers. She finished with 17 points, six rebounds, three assists and two blocks. Notably, however, she did not lead in any of those statistical categories. She did not have to.
Auriemma watched this romp in his usual state of visible unease. He did not smile when UConn went up by 20 or up by 30. He pursed his lips and looked up at the ceiling for a three-pointer. He put his hands on his hips and looked at the floor for a driving layup that drew a foul. But he smiled, at last, when he pulled his starters off the floor with a minute and a half to go. He wrapped each one in a hug. The last one off the court was Bueckers, and the hug for her was the longest, the fiercest and the most tear-soaked.
In the last few weeks of news conferences, Auriemma had called her “annoying,” “infuriating,” and a “con artist.” He had also admitted that he was going to miss her, and said that she was spectacular, and that he wanted this championship specifically for her. All of that ended up wrapped in that hug.
“I love you,” Auriemma said.
“I hate you,” Bueckers said back.
And they knew, of course, in a language that no one can speak quite as well as them, one they had built and bickered in over the last five years, that both of them had said the same thing.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Delayed but Not Denied, Paige Bueckers Gets a Perfect Ending at UConn.