He pointed to her four turnovers and shook his head. “What was that?” he asked her.
She quickly pointed to the column next over from the turnovers — a game-high four steals.
“Look,” she said. “I got it back. I got four steals.”
He laughed because he knew she wasn’t wrong (though he likely wouldn’t go as far to say she was right). Bueckers got back plenty in that game for herself and her teammates, smoothed over the rough patches and was the player who, whenever Auriemma was too deep into the team’s mistakes, could draw him back.
“Her mentality is always: This is what I did to help us win. I’m not worried about what the other stuff was,” Auriemma said. “I’ve admired that in her forever.”
The 24th Final Four for Geno Auriemma and the Huskies pic.twitter.com/RIeI1I74dX
— UConn Women’s Basketball (@UConnWBB) April 1, 2025
In that way, Bueckers is very much the yin to Auriemma’s yang. He’s a coach who has famously made his career on preparing for the worst-case scenario. Once, after completing one of the Huskies’ six undefeated seasons, he spent the bus ride back to campus (with a national championship trophy in tow), trying to figure out what went wrong so they could be even better the next year. While he can tell you all the ways a game could’ve or should’ve or did almost go to hell in a handbasket, it’s Bueckers — the perpetual optimist — who reminds him that UConn passed that exit on the expressway long ago and ended up somewhere better.
On Monday night, Bueckers’ performance — yes, including those turnovers — was still good enough for a path to Tampa. And, for the 24th time in Auriemma’s career and the fourth in Bueckers’, UConn is headed to the Final Four.
UConn players threw confetti at one another as they hugged family and friends, but there was no major pomp and circumstance for the occasion, no exaggerated celebration after UConn beat USC 78-64 in the Elite Eight. A team staff member performed the ceremonial task of sticking the UConn sticker to the 10-foot poster of the bracket that shows which team is moving forward to the Final Four. The ladders and scissors brought out to cut down the nets sat unused until finally two arena employees were told to take them down and store them in the backroom next to some unopened wooden crates. They carted them off and shimmied them behind two back-up baskets. UCLA, which had cut down the nets the night before for the program’s first Final Four appearance in the NCAA era, had requested that one ladder be shipped back to Westwood. But UConn doesn’t cut down the nets for a Final Four win.
Perhaps, the optimists in them believe there are even better nets to retrieve somewhere down the road. It has been a tradition in the program long enough that not even ...
