It’s four straight for amazing Huskies
Indianapolis — Breanna Stewart and Connecticut stand alone. Geno Auriemma, too, after another flawless season by the dominating Huskies.
UConn won an unprecedented fourth straight national championship Tuesday night, capping another perfect season by routing Syracuse, 82-51. Until now, only the UCLA men’s team had won four in a row in Division I, rolling to seven consecutive championships under John Wooden from 1967-’73. With Tuesday’s victory, Auriemma passed the Wizard of West-
wood with his 11th national title.
Peerless again.
“What those 11 championships mean to me is how many great players I’ve had the opportunity to coach,” Auriemma said. “How many great people have come through the program. It doesn’t matter whose name is above, or whose name I’m under. As long as I have those players in my memory, I’m good.”
Stewart said when she came to campus four years ago that she wanted to win four titles. She delivered on that promise by scoring 24 points and grabbing 10 rebounds in the final game of her brilliant college career.
“It’s unbelievable,” Stewart said. “That was our goal coming in here once we were freshman and to carry it out and win like this as seniors is unbelievable.”
Stewart and her fellow seniors Morgan Tuck and Moriah Jefferson posed on the ladder after cutting down the net for the final time. Mission accomplished.
“It wasn’t a sense of relief, it was a sense of success. This is exactly what we wanted,” Stewart said. “Going into every one of our national championship runs, we were confident and that’s what we were tonight, confident. We made history and to be able to say that we did that with those two guys, we’re
again.
Perfect going to remember that forever.”
The Huskies (38-0) have been nearly unbeatable since Stewart arrived. They lost four games her freshman year and only one since. The win over Syracuse was the 75th straight for UConn, all by double figures. Stewart and her fellow seniors went 24-0 in NCAA Tournament games, too.
Stewart earned the most outstanding player of the Final Four all four years of her career. No other women’s player has won it more than twice and only Lew Alcindor did it three times on the men’s side.
The three-time AP player of the year has said it is up to others to decide her place in women’s college basketball lore. There is no denying she is the most accomplished player ever, winning more titles than fellow UConn greats Diana Taurasi and Maya Moore, who watched from the stands at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.
“I’ll say this. She’s the greatest NCAA Tournament player I’ve ever been around,” Auriemma said. “When the lights were the brightest, that’s (when) she was at her best.”
Like the other great UConn teams, this version had a killer instinct. The Huskies scored the first nine points of the game. Stewart had 10 points in the first 6 minutes as UConn built a 23-6 lead. When the Orange made a little run to cut its deficit to 25-13, Jefferson hit a three-pointer just before the first-quarter buzzer. Stewart, Jefferson and Tuck, who have helped the Huskies to an NCAA-record 151 wins over their four years, combined for 26 of the 28 points in the period.