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Wendy Parker

Where the narrative is not madness

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.

With the dissolution of the UConn-Tennessee rivalry, UConn-Notre Dame had reached must-see status. 
 
These are the kinds of games, ESPN’s Doris Burke told me Saturday, that “were generating conversation outside of women’s basketball. They need to keep creating more of that.” 
 
As someone with playing and broadcasting roots in the women’s game, and who does more coverage of the men’s college game and NBA these days, Burke’s got a broader perspective than most. 
 
But there’s a difference between the development of genuine, intense rivalries and contriving matchups to suit TV programming needs and stimulate fan interest. 
 
Both games Sunday involve rematches from the regular season. 
 
UConn defeated Stanford in Storrs 76-57 on Nov. 11, when the Cardinal were a much more one-dimensional team than they are now.
 
As the season has gone along, All-American Chiney Ogwumike has gotten plenty of help from Mikaela Ruef at forward and guards Amber Orrange and Lili Thompson.
 
“We cannot be Chiney and the Chinettes,” she said about the rematch.  

 
The Terrapins upended top-seeded Tennessee in the Louisville regional, then knocked off the homestanding Cardinals on a hostile home floor in the Elite 8.
 
In January, the Irish had to dig out an 87-83 win over Maryland in College Park. 
 
The loss of Notre Dame center Natalie Achonwa to an ACL injury also will have a major impact on Sunday’s opener, as it diminishes the Irish’s dominance inside.
 
And the Terrapins can draw on their own past for inspiration. Two special visitors on Saturday were Laura Harper and Kristi Toliver, starters on Maryland’s 2006 NCAA championship team, who were chatting with Frese during an open practice.
 
Then a freshman, Toliver took one of the more iconic shots in recent Women’s Final Four history — a stepback 3-pointer over Duke’s Alison Bales that sent the game to overtime. 
 
It was sheer audacity in a moment of madness to take — and make — a shot that defied the preordained storyline.

 

 

Wendy Parker is a sportswriter and web editor who has covered women's basketball since the early 1990s. She is a correspondent for Basketball Times and formerly covered women's and college sports, soccer and the Olympics at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She is the author of "Beyond Title IX: The Cultural Laments of Women's Sports," available on Amazon, and the creator of Sports Biblio, a blog about sports books and history.

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