NASHVILLE — They’ve been here before, and won national championships too.
Maryland’s Brenda Frese has the same number of NCAA titles to her name (one) as Notre Dame’s Muffet McGraw, her counterpart on Sunday, and accomplished the feat more recently.
But when the Terrapins and Fighting Irish tip off the Women’s Final Four at Bridgestone Arena, that fact isn’t likely to come up in the talking points.
Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer has her Cardinal team back in the Women’s Final Four for the 12th time, and the sixth time in the last seven seasons.
Yet not many are giving Stanford a chance of dethroning the Huskies and derailing their bid for an NCAA record ninth national title in the finale of Sunday’s doubleheader.
That’s because in the NCAA women’s tournament, where the unprecedented chance of two undefeated teams playing for a national championship is only a win away for both, it is order, and not madness, that dominates the narrative.
“I feel like Maryland and Stanford are the extras at the Miss U.S.A. pageant,” said Frese in her opening press conference statements Saturday. 
“Everybody’s rooting for the other two. Our job is to be able to crash the party.”
VanDerveer’s metaphor was hunger-inducing, in a, well, literal way. But neither was she willing to concede the storyline.
“Connecticut and Notre Dame earned the right to be No. 1 seeds,” she said. “I think the media has kind of put them in the championship game to make it some Cinderella ball: Wouldn’t it be great to see these two undefeated teams?”
“If we’re going to be someone’s hors d’ouevres, we’re not going to get swallowed easily.”
But ESPN’s relentless “Pursuit of Perfection” theme doesn’t have much room for such resistance. In the women’s game, unblemished records trump the implausible buzzer-beater and advances of teams like the Dayton Flyers.
(When the Brigham Young women joined the Dayton men as the only mid-major teams to reach the Sweet 16 in their respective tournaments, the talk wasn’t about what the Cougars did on the court as much as how their upset over Nebraska might affect attendance at the Lincoln Regional. It didn’t cause as much of a dent as much as some feared, with nearly 9,000 showing up where UConn played.)
“They shouldn’t feel that they’re JV teams or extras in a pageant,” UConn coach Auriemma said of Maryland and Stanford.
Then he quipped: “I’ve never won a pageant.”
To be sure, the appeal of a UConn-Notre Dame final is undeniable, and not just because neither has lost a game.
With the breakup of the Big East, a regular season series between the two rivals came to an abrupt end. A non-conference home-and-home will begin in South Bend in December, and ESPN announced Saturday it will serve as the cable outlet’s Jimmy V women’s contest.
But it’s something of a stretch to suggest, as Harvey Araton did in The New York Times today, that resuming the rivalry on Tuesday with the NCAA title on the line “would turn the lack of a game between the Irish and Huskies this season into a stroke of great fortune for the sport at large.”
It’s understandable to want to believe that after last year’s four-game slugfest — with the Irish winning the first three times, then being eclipsed by UConn in the Final Four.
