UConn women's basketball's 12th national championship and first since 2016 holds a special place in longtime coach Geno Auriemma's heart.
"I just kept thinking, 'Something good has to happen,'" Auriemma said after Sunday's 82-59 win over South Carolina, "because if we were going to lose, it would've been before now. I don't think that the basketball gods would take us all the way to the end.
"They've been really cruel with some of these kids on this team. They've suffered a lot of the things that could go wrong in a college career as an athlete, so they don't need anymore heartbreak. So they weren't going to take us here and give us more heartbreak.
"I kept holding on to that, and I'm glad they were rewarded. This was one of the more emotional Final Fours and emotional national championships that I've been a part of since that very first one."
Look no further than senior guardsPaige Bueckers and Azi Fudd, who suffered season-ending injuries in the previous three years.
"The past four years, this group has been through so, so much adversity together," said Fudd, who was named the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four after scoring 24 points against the Gamecocks (35-4). "To be able to do this for our seniors -- I really don't have words to describe what this feels like, what it means to me, but I'm super grateful and I'm just super proud of this entire team."
Fudd started the first two games of the 2023-24 season before missing the year with ACL and meniscus tears. Bueckers missed 19 games in 2021-22 with a knee injury before tearing her ACL prior to the 2022-23 campaign and sitting the entire season.
"On the other side of a hard time is a really big blessing," said Bueckers, who complemented Fudd with 17 points against South Carolina. "We stuck to it. We kept the faith. To be rewarded with something like this -- you can't even really put it into words."
The Huskies (37-3) come full circle by defeating the reigning-champion Gamecocks, whom UConn also beat 87-58 Feb. 16 in Columbia, S.C.
"UConn's been the standard, so any time you can get any wins, you are breaking into moving ahead in the game," said South Carolina coach Dawn Staley. "... They know when you kick their butt and you know when you kick their butt, so it's the same way.
"I think they had the better team this year. And it's not always that you win when you have the better team, but they had the better team this year, they won and that's what you're supposed to do."
