Women's Final Four: UConn's 111-game streak is over, is a new era on the way?

DALLAS -- Connecticut’s almost unfathomable 66-64 loss to Mississippi State in the 2017 Women’s Final Four left mouths open on press row and in the stands alike Friday night in Dallas. But the reverberations from the end of their unprecedented 111-game winning streak, along with the impact on the game of women’s basketball, will continue to unfold in the months and years ahead.

Consider the extent to which the conversation around women’s basketball set Connecticut apart over the past half-decade. The program hadn’t suffered two consecutive losses since the 1992-93 season. Seeing Mississippi State beat Connecticut isn’t likely to signal anything like the end of the Huskies -- not with so many talented pieces returning from this 36-1 team. Not with Geno Auriemma and his amazing staff around to coach them. Not with a recruiting class led by top overall player Megan Walker and 6-6 transfer Azura Stevens coming in to give the team needed depth.

But not only did Connecticut lose, they lost to a team in Mississippi State without a single McDonald’s All-American on the roster. The talent base in women’s basketball has gotten steadily broader, with more teams competing for a Final Four seemingly by the year. Connecticut, though, stood apart in this era, untouchable. That can no longer be assumed.

“We kind of lived a charmed life for a long time, for a whole five months,” Auriemma said following the game. “Pheesa [Collier] played like a fifth-year senior, and today she struggled. [Katie] Lou [Samuelson] has been, you know, incredibly consistent all year long. Today she struggled. You take that and put it together against a really good team in this environment. ... I told them at halftime, It’s a miracle we’re only down eight.”

Auriemma has been talking all year about how he expected his team to lose. Truly, the only person in the entire arena who didn’t look shocked as the final minutes unfolded in Dallas was Auriemma, who has preached that his team had a smaller margin for error than anybody thought.

The potential payoff for the sport should be considered. Remember that in Connecticut and Auriemma, the comparison is often made to John Wooden’s UCLA. That not only makes sense numerically -- Wooden’s 10 championships only bested by Auriemma’s 11, the matching mystique and success more than a little remeniscent in Storrs of what once was taken for granted in Westwood -- but the men’s and women’s games are at similar stages in development.

The men’s NCAA Tournament debuted in 1939. So when Wooden won his last NCAA title, in 1975, the tournament was 36 years old. The women’s NCAA Tournament began in 1982. When Auriemma won his 11 title, in 2016, the tournament was 34 years old. The two kept and developed players for four years at a time. It isn’t shocking that there is an Auriemma now --here’s precedent.

What came after Wooden won his last, of course, was a golden era for men’s college basketball. Quietly, the talent base had broadened. That exploded into the public consciousness in the years that followed, Al McGuire’s Marquette, Bobby Knight’s Indiana, teams that captured the public imagination -- like Vic Schaefer’s Mississippi State, perhaps, or Dawn Staley’s South Carolina, also just 40 minutes from their first national title. Somebody is winning for the first time, that’s what Friday night assured. 

It all happened in part because UCLA set the standard. So, too, has Connecticut.

Soon enough came Bird and Magic, the modern explosion of the NCAA Tournament for the men -- an event so exciting that in 1982, the women finally got the chance to do the same. Opportunities too often in sports and so many other avenues come late or not at all for women, but history has taught us that opportunity alone is all that’s required.

That’s what Mississippi State had Friday night in Dallas, and took advantage. In the process, the Bulldogs shattered the invincibility of Connecticut, and set into motion the potential for a new golden age for women’s college basketball, one years in the making, and made possible by the standard Connecticut has set.

“When stuff like this happens, it kind of makes me shake my head and go, You know how many times this could have happened and it didn’t happen?” Auriemma said. “The fact that it never happened, that doesn’t mean I went home thinking, It’s never going to happen. I knew this was coming at some point. I’m just shocked that it took this long to get here.”