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Alexa Philippou
Tampa, Fla. – Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi and Breann Stewart gathered at Uconn Huskies“Team Hotel after losing its alma mater in the national game at the National Championship 2022 to South Carolina. Trio UConn Grags wanted to comfort Huskies – a Paige Bueckers.
The defeat was devastating, historical; The first loss in the national title game in the history of the program after 11 previous victories and extending the school championship drought for another year. And yet, the graduates wanted to assure Bueckers, then only Sophomore, that such a turning point was part of the process.
“(Names) will never come without some really tested times,” recalls Bird, who says Bueckers and teammate Azzi advantage. “Even if you go 39-0 in the season, it was still not perfect.” Bueckers’ tenure in Storrs, although undoubtedly impressive, was far from perfect. Her first year was held in a bubble in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. She missed over half of her Sophomore season and throughout her junior year with knee injuries, most subsequently tearing her ACL in the summer of 2022. She achieved the last four three times before this year – including this national game on the national title – and lagged each case.
Until now. In her last game as Husky, Bueckers won a national title, gained 17 points and grabbed six rebounds to win 82-59 over the defense of a champion in South Carolina and secured the only award that disappeared from Bueckers’ biography and captured nine-year-old Uconn’s title.
The last five years for Bueckers and Uconn have been defined by their common persecution about this sought -after championship, and the common thread collided and needs to find a way back. Their fates have long been interconnected, Auriemma said in 2023, while his star still rehabilitated her ACL operation. “Our story is her story and her story is our story in many ways,” he said. “Hopefully the story ends where he gets what he wants and gives us what we want.”
The road could be peripheral. The process could try. But the end for Bueckers and Uconn? It was as perfect as it got.
“It’s really a fairy tale,” said Rebecca Lobo, who, like Bueckers, won the first and only National Championship with Uconn in her last career game. I think for her and the way she had, what she went through, that also means that so much because of all the attempts and tribulation she had on her way. ”
For nearly six years On the day before the Bueckers shortened networks at the Amalie Arena, she visited Tampa as a secondary school junior, who participated in the Four 2019 final for the US basketball. It was only a few days after she announced her commitment to Uconn, her dream school, where she imagined winning the championships and got Huskies back to the top.
Pairing Bueckers in Uconn showed trouble -free. When she connected with her match with her dominance, she took the university basketball world by storms as soon as she arrived in Storrs, and became the first newcomer to win more awards of the National Player of the Year. She was powered by Huskies to the Final Four, but even after they were angry with Arizona in the National Semifinal, he felt that time was on the Bueckers and the Uconn side.
However, the central chapters of the Bueckers career would teach her that nothing – no time, not the opportunities of mastery or health – could not be taken for granted. She missed 19 games with a fracture of the tibial plateau and the tear of Meniscus as Sophomore, later admitted that her return forced too quickly. After her ACL lasted four months later, she sat her entire junior season.
Bueckers pushed for almost two years of rehabilitation and often masked her mental and emotional anxiety. She has completely changed her approach to the game, and how she takes care of her body, prefers better nutrition, accepts pilates and works with one of the most famous specialists to improve women’s performance. She leaned into her faith; She said that even though she didn’t understand why she had happened to her, she believed that there was a reason God gave her an obstacle.
Things went far from smoothly, even though she returned to court in November 2023. Last season she took a toll for her because Huskies faced a new killing injury ending season. On Postseason Bueckers, she played some of her career basketball, back better than ever of her ACL, but a happy player with a happy hint was nowhere to see, replaced by someone who felt so much weight that he would wake up to Gamedays just wanted them to end.
“I was worried about everything that could go wrong,” Bueckers said, “that you can’t do anything right,” which in the national semifinals got on his head when Huskies fell into Iowy.
This last year, Bueckers’ fifth in the program, was different. With the help of a sports psychologist and continuing Auriemma leadership, she learned how to stay where her legs were. If it weren’t so oriented to the result. How to be more in peace with yourself, to run your own race and not to let pressure at ever -balancers will become a burden
And in the lead to the title game, before it was crowned by the champion, Bueckers said that there was no change in his journey with her teammates – “Just because it shaped us and how it formed our mentality, how our faith and faith in everything that happened for some reason.”
12 National The Auriemma Championship has won more than 40 years of coaching, have not changed their thinking: the victory is difficult, so much of your control to break.
For most of Bueckers’ career, he felt that it had little to work in her favor. Her time in Storrs overlapped with the most snake attempted in decades: from Bueckers’ Sophomore of the year, Uconn experienced 12 injuries ending season. BUCKERS AND FUDD, who were admitted for the strongest Backcourt pair in the country, appeared together in just 17 games in front of the 2024-25 campaign. It was a section that Fudd described as “connected (team) by trauma”.
Although Huskies found four Bueckers’ Sophomore and Redshirt Junior years in the finals, it wasn’t with the group Auriemma felt she was healthy enough to have a real chance to win it all. This is what bothers the coach as much as possible, he said this weekend, about how the last few seasons had taken place. Because he was as sensational as the Bueckers, Auriemma has long claimed that she could not raise Uconn to the championship – and collide like Juggernaut in South Carolina – herself.
In the end, in their last season in Storrs, the stars aligned. For the first time in years, Auriumma felt as if he was playing with a full deck. “We have a little chance to be able to manipulate the game a little better than we had before, it is enriching,” he said on Saturday. “This replaces all grief and all the trauma and tribulation we had to go through.”
Fudd enjoyed her most healthy season since she arrived in Uconn and played double the game (34) this year than in the previous two combined (17). Freshman Sarah Strong – Who announced his obligation to Uconn a year ago on Sunday- even overcome inner expectations and appeared as one of the best players in the country and SuperStar alone.
Bueckers-Fudd-Silent monster was reminded of Auriemm in December of some of his other master cores: Rebecca Lobo, Kara Wolters and Nykesha Sales; Breanna Stewart, Morgan Tuck and Moriah Jefferson; Renee Montgomery, Maya Moore and Tina Charles.
This creation of this team UConn – which beyond the Bueckers distorts younger and inexperienced due to the magic of the injury – has been slow burning throughout the season, especially after premature losses for Notre Dame and USC. But 10 days after they looked like a shell of themselves in Knoxville, they showed their first real look at what they could be, and demolished South Carolina by 29 points in Columbia – a harbinger of what to figure out.
Bueckers saved some of its best performances for its final NCAA tournament and earned 105 points during the second round, Sweet 16 and Eight Eight Games, the most points earned in any three games on the Uconn player.
It was a suitable indicator of Auriemmy Championship to get his teams to reach the top time at the right time – and according to collective hunger, given that all Huskies passed as individuals and everything they have gone together.
“I think many of us, our thinking is like, yes, we really want to win the National Championship,” Fudd ESPN said. “But I think most of us in the team are like, we want to do it for Paige.”
The same applies to Auriemma. 12. The national title has a small impact on his life, he said on Saturday. But he has huge on Bueckers.
“Whenever you can have a hand that helps someone, when you talked to them when they were 17 years old, about what could happen if you came to Uconn, and you’re in a position to really do it,” said Auriemma, “I think it’s the most pleasing thing for me at this stage.
It was 30 Last Wednesday ago, Huskies celebrated his first national championship after defeating Tennessee at the finish center of Minneapolis. They thought they could get their full circle back in 2022, when Bueckers, Hopkins, Minnesota product, returned to the state for its second finals. Instead, however, three years later in Sunshine, when Minnesota Kid released Huskies back to the mountains in her latest collegial basketball game and went to sunset by a champion.
Auriemma tried to consider that Bueckers did not need a championship to be considered one of the highest giants of the program, that its individual game and the ability to lift all around her increased Huskies to heights that would not reach without it. People discussed what her heritage would be without a ring. But now it’s Pocid.
Sunday was her coronation and Bueckers’ permanent mark is that she did it in her own way. She overcame injuries that would be a lot from the course. In the middle of the ever -growing reflector in sport, she found comfort in who he is, as a player and as a person. It grew out of those devastating losses to Arizona, South Carolina, Iowa, all these failures make the final success much sweeter.
“There is something very verifying about winning the championship. There is something about winning people when you win a championship,” Bird said. “I would imagine that I just got a roller coaster ride that was her career in terms of injury, I think it would be just a warm, gloomy way to end everything.”
Added Lobo: “When you get to the other side and look back, you realize that the kind of perfection of it all. How many players end with their career victory?
