SPOKANE, Wash. — Paige Bueckers knows how to throw a going-away party.
A day after confirming she’ll enter next month’s WNBA draft, where she is all but guaranteed to be the No. 1 pick, Bueckers dropped a career-high 40 points on Oklahoma on Saturday and sent UConn into the Elite Eight for the fourth time in her career.
“Honestly, we just wanted to keep our season going as long as possible,” Bueckers said after the 82-59 win. “We all love playing together, we love playing here. We just love this program and everything it means, so we want it to keep going as long as possible.”
The 40 points is a UConn record in the NCAA tournament, mind-boggling when you consider the players who have come before Bueckers. Diana Taurasi. Sue Bird. Maya Moore. Breanna Stewart. Napheesa Collier. And on and on.
Still, even that milestone can’t convey how sublime ‘Paige Buckets’ was. With UConn trailing Oklahoma at the half, Bueckers simply took over. She single-handedly outscored the Sooners in the second half, 29 to 23. She had 19 in the fourth quarter, on 8-of-9 shooting, despite playing only seven minutes.
She shot almost 60% for the game, including 6 of 8 from 3-point range. Bueckers also had six rebounds, three steals and an assist.
“Paige was spectacular,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “That was as good a game as I’ve seen her play the whole time she’s been here. At the most important time.”
Again, given the Who’s Who of UConn’s former players, that’s about as high praise as it gets.
But that’s Bueckers.
She arrived at UConn as one of the most heralded prospects in the school’s history and has done nothing but meet the expectations and then some. On and off the court.
She was the first freshman ever to win player of the year honors. She has taken UConn to the Final Four in each of her previous three seasons. (She missed the 2022-23 season with a torn ACL.) Before Caitlin Clark and JuJu Watkins took the country by storm, it was Bueckers who showed there could be a market and a mania for female athletes.
She has used her platform to lift up not only other women, but people of color. She is humble, aware of her spotlight but not enthralled by it. She is more comfortable sharing the credit with her teammates, even when she could claim all of it for herself.
She is, in every sense of the word, a real one. And she’s not going to waste a second of whatever she’s doing.
“We see this every day at practice, right? Every day at practice there’s long stretches of exactly what you saw today and little by little it’s dawned on her, I think, that there is no next year. There is no, ‘I can get this anytime I want,” Auriemma said.
“You’re going to have to get it now or it won’t be available anymore.”
That this is Bueckers’ last season was always assumed. She has another year of eligibility because of the knee injury but, at 23, she’s been at UConn for five years now. WNBA teams are salivating over her the same way they did Clark last year. UConn honored her at its final home game.
But Bueckers didn’t make it official that she’s headed for the W until Friday, which automatically made the expectations on her and UConn, already outsized, even larger.
‘Paige is held to a different standard than a lot of other kids,’ Auriemma said. ‘Paige can do things during the course of a game that most people can’t do. But she’s certainly not going to win tonight’s game or Monday’s game by herself. And if we lose, it’s not because she lost it.
‘So we’ve been talking about that a lot these last couple of weeks to just kind of put her at ease, because the outside pressure just keeps growing and growing and growing.”
That pressure, though, pales in comparison to the prospect of not ever playing for UConn again. Bueckers knows the day is coming. She knows she has, at most, three games left with Auriemma and her teammates. She knows her college career is now measured in minutes rather than months or years.
And while she is ready for whatever comes next, as a player and a person, she’s not ready to go just yet. As a result, this last ride might wind up being Bueckers’ best yet.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.