NCAA championship: Paige Bueckers' culminating title moment took something extra — and her UConn teammates delivered

TAMPA, Fla. — It took a full minute of game action for Paige Bueckers to make her way down the Connecticut bench. First, she embraced head coach Geno Auriemma near the scorer’s table as play continued behind her. She carried on down through coaches and teammates and personnel, attempting to encapsulate entire relationships into five-second hugs. The family and friends stood rows deep behind them, as they had for most of the second half. The arena was deep into a celebration nearly a decade in waiting.

It is a championship of destiny and God’s perfect plan, Bueckers said. As the Huskies knocked off one team after another these past three months, she’s focused on the faith that everything happens for a reason. Her injuries. Those of Azzi Fudd, the best friend she recruited to join her in Connecticut. The ache of close calls and maybes that prevented her from even one championship when she had realistic plans for multiple.

As she carried on down the path, the subs of a healthy UConn team killed off clock. Those on the bench waited in giddy anticipation until the buzzer, waiting for the confetti to fall. A few stray pieces had fallen ahead of tip-off, a fleeting moment of hope before it was all settled.

Yet now, Bueckers was heading out a national champion with a supporting cast she’d never been able to lean on in years prior as injuries ravaged the roster and Auriemma piecemealed plans. The celebrations and cheers, the trophy, the honors were won not by a singular Bueckers effort, but a combination of three-headed attack that included Fudd and Sarah Strong.

The Huskies talked about it as a team heading into Sunday’s rematch. They had not played their best game yet in the tournament, and what better time than now?

“It’s been just, I think, a great summary of what we have been this entire season of being a team, staying connected, on any given night it can be anybody’s night,” Bueckers said. “And how we play as a team, and I think that was just a great showing for that between last game and this game. So it’s extremely fitting.”

After suffering through multiple serious injuries during her college career, UConn’s Paige Bueckers is now an NCAA champion. (M. Anthony Nesmith/Getty Images)

(Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

This 12th championship team is the most emotional of Auriemma’s titles since the very first in 1995, he said. He’s sent out many senior classes, but this one was special. It was a longer, bumpier ride they had no choice but to endure.

“I just kept thinking something good has to happen because if we were going to lose, it would have been before now,” head coach Geno Auriemma said. “I don’t think the basketball gods would take us all the way to the end — they’ve been really cruel with some of the kids on this team. They’ve suffered a lot of the things that could go wrong in their college careers 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.”

Bueckers had never won a championship largely because of health, both her own and that of others. She missed a season with an ACL tear. Fudd missed the next one with her own ACL tear. When the two did play in a national championship game against South Carolina, the same program the Huskies beat on Sunday, it was fresh off losing one of their key players and with limited production from Fudd, who had food poisoning. Tim Fudd, Azzi’s father, remembers seeing her “as pale as a ghost” that morning.

Bueckers couldn’t defeat a power alone. And when she had a second chance, she didn’t have to carry the largest load. South Carolina played her tight, hoping to take the ball out of her hands, and she finished an inefficient 5-of-14 from the floor with 17 points. It was close to her 2022 national title game production.

But in Tampa on Sunday, Fudd woke up healthy and in the right mindset. Her parents send her text messages before every game, usually with tips. Ahead of the national championship game, Tim’s message told her to have a chip on her shoulder. Start the attack and stay on it. Get to your pull-up, defend, rebound.

“Total domination today,” it read.

And this time it was. As South Carolina and UConn traded buckets in the first quarter of a furious start, Fudd remained unbothered. Fudd was aggressive and found her spots, a necessity as a kind of “odd man out” in what her dad described as “three-headed monster.” She attempted a good early 3-pointer, even though it missed, nailed a mid-range jumper and tipped a pass from Raven Johnson to score the other way.

“I was like, OK, she’s doing it,” Tim Fudd told Yahoo Sports. “That told me right away this was going to happen.”

The coaching staff felt all tournament that Fudd was the key. If she scored around 16 points or more, UConn would win. In the title game, she led with 24 points (9 of 17), five rebounds and three steals. That was all while hitting only one 3-pointer, her most significant contribution on most nights. It came with an 11-point third quarter Fudd credited to teammates as UConn put it away to cheers and chants.

“Being able to do it with this group is so incredible,” Fudd said. “I mean, there’s a lot that — just this season, the ups and downs of the season, but the past four years, this group has been through so much adversity together.”

Fudd, who announced she will return to UConn on a redshirt year, earned Most Outstanding Player honors.

“We kind of know what we’re going to get from Paige,” Auriemma said. “We kind of know what we’re going to get from Sarah. So Azzi became the focal point for us of who [had] to step up tonight. And she did magnificently, obviously.”

Strong, the freshman, is a constant and lived up to that with 24 points on the most efficient shooting performance of the day (10-of-15, 2-of-3 3FG) alongside 15 rebounds, five assists, two steals and three blocks. She set the Division I record for most points in a tournament by a freshman.

“I feel like I did better than I was expecting,” Strong said. “It’s cool to [have that record]. That wouldn’t have happened without my teammates, though.”

As large as her play is on the court, she’s as quiet and concise off it. At every three-sentence answer, Auriemma would prompt her for more. To expand. She’ll be the star of the Huskies soon, seeking more for a program that wants for nothing, yet still strives constantly for more.

“In the next three years, she might be the best player to come out of UConn,” South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley said on Saturday. “And those are strong words, I know. Stewie [Breanna Stewart] won four, right?”

She did, and watched the celebrations courtside, basking in a championship drought finally ended. She was the last class to win one, finishing off a four-in-four years run Bueckers, a generational talent out of Minnesota, hoped to repeat.

Paige Bueckers got a curtain call late in UConn’s national championship win over South Carolina, hugging coach Geno Auriemma and all of her teammates. (Thien-An Truong/Getty)

(Thien-An Truong/ISI Photos via Getty Images)

Auriemma said there were people in his inner circle after that 2016 championship that thought he should have called it and retired. He opted not to, and heard the noise that it was someone else’s turn to take over. That name, image, likeness and the transfer portal were changing the deal, making it so an older coach couldn’t last. That he might not be able to win.

“I just kept thinking, you know, I kind of owe it to these people to kind of let me see if we can take a whole team, what could happen?” Auriemma said. “Because these people that have been playing against us for the last seven, eight years have not played a University of Connecticut team. Yet, beating UConn always seemed like the national championship to them. For us it always seemed like, if we ever got a chance to get healthy, this could be pretty good.”

It coincided with Bueckers’ journey when she committed ahead of the 2020-21 season. It was the COVID year and she played in front of empty stands, a difficult recollection in the aftermath of nearly 20,000 at Amalie Arena in what felt to Fudd like a home game. When they reached the final game in 2022, Auriemma thought, maybe if they won, he would have lived up to his promise.

“Because it didn’t happen, it was just almost like a crusade on our coaching staff’s part to, let’s do this, let’s do this, let’s do this,” Auriemma said. “Who knew it would turn out like this? But I started to trust in them. And when I tell you it’s really out of your hands, it really is true. All of this is in the hands of the players who are playing. And they made it all worthwhile today.”

Bueckers, who many alumni insisted is Auriemma’s favorite, and her coach have exchanged barbs all weekend and for years prior. She joked when she exited the game that final time, Auriemma told her he loved her and she said she hated him.

Auriemma delivered his own jest, indulging his champion in a nicety first.

“Today was the first one, I think, in five years that all the emotions that have been building inside of me came out,” he said. “And they came out in here because in five years that she’s been at Connecticut I’ve never seen her cry.

“And she might deny it, but she cried because she’s going to miss me.”

Surely, she’ll be back standing with the rest of the alumni one day, watching another class stashing confetti in hats and holding newspapers reading “Champs Again.”

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NCAA championship: Paige Bueckers’ culminating title moment took something extra — and her UConn teammates delivered

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