SPOKANE, Washington — No one is beating UConn.
Not USC on Monday night in the Elite Eight. Not UCLA, South Carolina or Texas in the Final Four, either. There are still three games left in the season, but you can be certain of this: When the buzzer sounds Sunday night, it’ll be Paige Bueckers and UConn cutting down the nets on the Huskies’ 12th national title, and first since 2016.
UConn is simply too good, too deep — two days after Bueckers went off for 40, she had 31 points while freshman Sarah Strong dropped a casual 22 and 17 double-double — and too determined.
‘We’ve got a whole lot of heart and a whole lot of toughness about us,’ Bueckers said after UConn’s 78-64 win over JuJu Watkins-less USC.
‘And we play together as a team. We’re super well connected,’ she added. ‘I feel like every team that I’veplayed on we’ve been super well connected, but just the way — we’ve been through so much adversity asindividuals, as a team, and how much it’s brought us together, how much it’s made us stronger.’
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UConn is the only non-No. 1 seed to advance to the Final Four. But there is little question the No. 2 seed Huskies are playing better than anyone right now, and it’s not even close. Overall No. 1 seed UCLA had its hands full with LSU. Defending champion South Carolina had to squeak by Duke. Texas got tested by Tennessee.
UConn, meanwhile, rolls into the Final Four with a 14-game winning streak that is best in the country. It has won its four tournament games by an average of 35 points, the ‘closest’ the 14-point win over USC. And if voting for National Player of the Year was done now, it’d be Bueckers. In a landslide.
She’s scored 105 points in her last three games, the most prolific three-game span in UConn history. Given the Who’s Who of players who’ve worn the Huskies uniform, that is a staggering statistic.
‘Without that ‘It’ thing, where one player, in this case Paige and Sarah, without those two players playing to the level that they’re playing at, you wouldn’t get to the Final Four,’ UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. ‘If you don’t have those players, you’re not going anywhere.’
But Bueckers isn’t simply a scoring machine. She finished with six assists, four steals, three rebounds and two blocks against USC. And when USC pared what had been a 19-point lead to five at the end of the third quarter, Bueckers called game.
After Azzi Fudd opened the fourth quarter with a 3-pointer, snapping an 0-for-9 streak, Bueckers scored on a pull-up jumper. Aubrey Griffin then stole the ball and fed Bueckers, who drained a 3. Then it was Bueckers’ turn to pick USC’s pocket, stripping a Kennedy Smith pass and hitting Fudd, who made another 3 to put UConn up 62-48.
There were still almost seven minutes left, but the game was effectively over. Bueckers finished the fourth quarter with 11 points, on 3-of-5 shooting, as well as three assists, a block and a steal.
‘I think the confidence that we have in Paige and Sarah, specifically, makes everybody on our team feel really, really, really assured that I just have to do my part and it will be good enough,’ Auriemma said.
Maybe this Elite Eight game with USC, a rematch of last year, would have been different if Watkins hadn’t suffered a season-ending knee injury in a second-round game a week earlier. Watkins is, like Bueckers, a generational talent, and she had USC’s last three points, as well as the assist on the Trojans’ final field goal, when they outlasted UConn in December.
‘I think at some point the emotions of the last seven days will kick in more. It was only tonight a week ago that one of the best players in college basketball and someone just so meaningful to everything weare went down,’ USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb said, fighting tears. ‘And I’m just so proud of the way thateveryone rallied.’
Even with Watkins, though, it would have been an uphill climb to beat this UConn team.
This is UConn’s 24th Final Four, and the fourth in as many years for Bueckers. (She missed her junior season with a torn ACL. Not coincidentally, UConn didn’t make the Final Four that year, the Huskies’ first absence since 2007.)
But UConn has not won a national title since 2016. It is the only accolade missing in Bueckers’ illustrious career, having lost in the title game in 2022 and in the Final Four in 2021 and 2024, and her determination to fill that hole practically oozes off her.
‘I really believe that, as Paige said, having gone through all those things, and our team having to overcome all those issues — How do we get there with only five or six players? How do we get there when everybody’s got to play 40 minutes? How do we get there in spite of everything? — it has toughened us up a little bit and it has made us a little stronger individually and collectively. Believe in each other a little bit more, maybe,’ Auriemma said.
There have been many times in the UConn dynasty when the NCAA title felt inevitable, when the Huskies were simply better than everyone else. That no matter who the opponents were, they were bound to be satellites to UConn’s star. The Huskies simply would not be denied.
This feels very much like one of those times.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.