CLEVELAND — Future generations will have a hard time understanding that, the same way they would imagine Babe Ruth beating every team at home or imagining the Roman Empire stretching from England to Egypt.
UConn won half of the national championships (11) from 1995 to 2016.
They have reached the Final Four in all but one of the last 15 games.
Geno Auriemma entered Friday’s national semifinal game against Iowa with an .883 winning percentage, the highest in college basketball history.
He led the Huskies to six undefeated seasons.
He finished his remaining six seasons with just one loss.
All this despite inheriting a program that had one winning season in 11 years before taking over in 1985.
It’s been eight years since the UW women’s team was the last one standing.
Seven years have passed since the unbroken 111-game winning streak came to an end.
The Huskies have not been a No. 1 seed in the past three NCAA Tournaments.
This year, they are the No. 3 seed, tied for the school’s lowest since 1994.
Gone are the days when UW ruled college basketball like a dictator.
And the adjustment was easier than the 70-year-old Auriemma imagined.
“I remember at that moment when we were getting most of the attention, before the NCAA Tournament, someone asked one of the coaches, ‘Do you have a preference for the player you want to win the NCAA Tournament?’ ” …and they said, “We don’t care unless it’s Tennessee or Connecticut.” “There was a time when people were waiting for other storylines,” Auriemma said this week. “I like it when all the other coaches get so much attention and there’s so much pressure to win. They always thought I was easy. Now they want to go back to anonymity. That’s why I’m enjoying this.”
In the preseason, LSU was the top-ranked team and added talent to its championship roster.
South Carolina had lost three games in the past two years. Iowa State returns the best player in the country to a team that just advanced to the national title game.
UW’s loss in the Sweet 16 was its first loss in the NCAA Tournament since 2007 without making the Final Four.
Paige Bueckers returned, but her ceiling was murky after the former National Player of the Year missed all of last season with a torn ACL.
The Huskies opened as title contenders, but lost five players to season-ending injuries and lost all five games to elite teams seeded No. 3 or higher in the NCAA Tournament, falling behind by double digits. It seemed like they had slipped from the top teams in the sport.
After that, Bueckers rebuilt the team.
Auriemma got the most out of his six-man rotation.
Regardless of whether we ended up with just one, it was a season that we can cherish like a championship.
“If you had talked to me in June of this year, I would have said, ‘Yeah, it was us and South Carolina playing for the national championship.’ But then, as things started happening, I… I started to believe something, ‘No,'” Auriemma said. “You need to be realistic, but we live in a world where college expectations are unrealistic. But you need to be realistic.
“This year has definitely been one of the most challenging seasons of my career. And I have so much respect for my team and I’m really proud of them… It’s probably one of the most gratifying things I’ve had to experience in my 40 years in Connecticut. If you had asked me, I would have said it would take a miracle.”
