Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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wa's injury, the Fighting Irish played magnificently enough against Mary- land in the Final Four with an 87-61 victory to tease one into believing that this squad would not be denied. The Terrapins had given Notre Dame its toughest game of the season, when they took a second-half lead before fall- ing 87-83 Jan. 27. Yet in the Final Four, even without Achonwa, the Fighting Irish crushed the taller Maryland team on the boards by a 50-21 margin to set up the long-awaited showdown against one-time Big East rival Connecticut. HE SAID, SHE SAID The pregame banter between Mc- Graw and Connecticut head coach Geno Auriemma was ESPN's dream and helped set up the best rating for a women's college basketball game in 10 years (3.1 metered market rating). A day before the game, when Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch asked Mc- Graw about the competitive relation- ship between her and Huskies eight- time national champion Auriemma, McGuire was in no mood to sing Kum- baya. "We don't have a relationship," Mc- Graw said. "I think that [the civility] got lost. When we were in the same conference [the Big East] I think there was a modicum of it, but I think after beating them and not feeling any re- spect from that, we lost something." When asked if the civility could come back, she replied, "That would be dif- ficult." Auriemma's response was typically candid as well. "We've got two really, really good teams," he said. "… The other stuff is such nonsense. I could sit here and list 10,000 coaches that don't interact with each other whose rivalries are intense. "This is a function of women's bas- ketball. Sometimes we act like girls, like we're supposed to go to dinner ev- ery night. We're supposed to play each other, try to beat each other 's brains out, try to win a national champion- ship and compete like hell, Muffet and Geno, and then we're supposed to get together afterward and go have a bottle of wine. That's just not going to hap- pen. So stop asking why it doesn't hap- pen." At the beginning and end of the con- test, both maintained a cordial and civil demeanor. "I said something like, 'I thought we were playing the Miami Heat for a while; you guys are just that good,'" McGraw relayed when asked what she said to Auriemma after the game. "'What a great season.' Things like that. I thought they were just missing LeB- ron." Auriemma has become to women's basketball what John Wooden was at UCLA from 1964-75 while finishing 10-0 in championship games. Since 1995, Auriemma is 9-0 in championship games, and five of the eight unbeaten women's basketball seasons since the NCAA Tournament began in 1982 be- long to his Huskies. UConn became only the second team to finish 40-0. The other was Baylor in 2012. Both times the final victim was Notre Dame. Once again, second only to one. YOU CAN'T TEACH HEIGHT Like sharks smelling blood with the