At the Quest Championship, Uconn’s Paige Bueckers and Geno Auriemma bring best within

Spokane, Wash. – When Paige Bueckers and Geno Auriemma sat on the stage after hitting the ticket in Tampa at Final Four, Auriemma pointed to the score of the box on the sheet of paper. Not to play all 40 minutes or earned 31 points. Not to its 50 percent shooting for a 3-point line or its nine fouls drawn or its two blocks or six assists.

He pointed to her four turnover and shook his head. “What was that?” He asked her.

She quickly pointed to a column of turnover-high games.

“Look,” she said. “I got it back. I have four thefts.”

He laughed because he knew he wasn’t wrong (although he would probably not be so far, he said he was right). In that game, Bueckers got a lot back for themselves and their teammates, smoked over the harsh spots and was a player who was at any time Auriemma too deep into the team’s mistakes could pull him back.

“Her mentality is always: that’s what I did to help us win. I’m not afraid of what the other things were,” Auriemma said. “I admired it in her forever.”

24. Four Four for Geno Auriemma and Huskies pic.twitter.com/riei1i74dx

– UConn Women’s Basketball (@UConnwbb) April 1 2025

In this way, Bueckers is very yin to Auriemmy’s Yang. He is a coach who has made his career great in preparing for the worst case scenario. Once, after completing one of the six undefeated seasons of Huskies, he spent a bus ride back to the campus (with the trophy of the National Championship in Hinge) and tried to find out what went wrong to be even better next year. Although he can tell you all the ways the game could or would almost go to hell in hell, they are Bueckers – an eternal optimist – that reminds him that Uconn has gone through this ascent long ago and ended somewhere better.

On Monday evening, Bueckers’ performance – yes, including these turns – still good enough to travel to Tampa. And after 24 times. In the career of Auriemmy and the fourth in Bueckers, Uconn is heading to Final Four.

Uconn players threw on themselves when they hugged family and friends, but there was no great pomp and circumstance for this occasion, no exaggerated celebration after Uconn defeated the USC 78-64 in Eight. The team employee performed a ceremonial task of sticking the sticker Uconn on the 10-foot poster of the holder that shows which team moves forward to Final Four. The charts and scissors brought to reduce nets that were unused, until eventually it was said that two arena employees were taken off and placed behind the scenes next to some unopened wooden boxes. They threw them and shake them for two backup baskets. The UCLA, which yesterday had reduced networks for the first four performances of the NCAA era, asked one ladder to be sent back to Westwood. But Uconn does not reduce nets for the victory Final Four.

Perhaps optimists believe there are even better networks to get somewhere along the road. It was a tradition in the program so long that even Auriemma, who could tell you about the recruitment he missed in 1993, does not even remember his exact origin.

This is the world that helped create in Uconn, with assistance from players like Bueckers. He jokes that there are Disneyland, Disney World and Uconn – all fantasy lands where things that make no sense are still happening. Like 16 finals four in 17 years. In one year in the last 17 years, when Huskies did not go to Final Four, instead went to the male tournament. He was sitting in the stalls. He encouraged a team of men Uconn. Initially, he enjoyed that he did not feel the stress of coaches on the sidelines who lost his mind over missed calls and mistakes. Could separate from the hunt.

Then he realized how much he missed it. How much he wanted to believe that he could help all his players feel how these players felt on the pitch, still go with them in a place where he could have a tempo on the side line at the end of the road and reduce nets.

That’s why Bueckers came to Uconn. Go to Final Fours and win the National Championships. She has reached the former, but not yet. Auriemma did not say it out loud, but it seems obvious how bad he wants for Bueckers. When he and his colleagues gave her the trophy of the regional championship after defeating the USC, there was a feeling that much more would come, even if the target line was in sight. But there is still one more trophy that Bueckers has never held.

He knows what you need to get there. He was there 11 times.

National titles take at least one (but sometimes more than one) player who has him. A player who has a load and controls the team’s potential. A player who has to show up.

Bueckers it’s for this team.

He knows she can because she is an optimist. And he knows that he can, because he spent five years pointing to all the turns and mistakes and fall in his game. In the midst of her own fights – seasons derailed by injuries and pandemic bubble tournament, moments when she asked why it seemed that the chips had never fallen – remained steadily positive and continues to equalize Auriemma.

Place the confetti pic.twitter.com/v7bsnpclw

– UConn Women’s Basketball (@UConnwbb) April 1 2025

For nearly 40 years in his career Uconn, Chrastít can from players who have made a special mark not only of the program but also on it. When the most winning coach at university basketball became the most winning coach, several of these players – Maya Moore, Sue Bird, Rebecca Lobo, Diana Tauras – spoke after the game.

The game is now different and the world around the game is changing completely. Auriemma remained alone, but he is also different. He is now older and in the last point in the last decade – he cannot accurately point out when – he passed out of his feeling, as if his players were his children to feel as if they were his grandchildren.

He watched the Bueckers through the world of the Nile and increased glory in women’s university basketball. It is an accurate landscape with unexpected obstacles with which no one else he had trained with had to deal with, and saw the Bueckers did with grace, while continuing to increase the program – an almost impossible task due to the perfection that he helped in Storr.

“To get all the attention she gets, she has all the requirements for her life, all expectations in her life and still able to add?” Auriemma said after victory over USC. “I thought he was a unique individual when I saw her in high school. … I think he’s closer to (number) of one or two or three of the most unique players I’ve ever trained.”

For Auriemma, it doesn’t mean two more games with her, another 80 minutes of playing a player who – every time he goes wrong for someone – would pull him back from the edge and reminded him, “No, they can do it. They’re really good.”

“She always sees the best of all,” Auriemma said. “Refreshing.”

When he sat on stage on Monday evening, after returning to the dressing room to celebrate with her teammates, he continued a person he was for the program. Threw into the Jabs because he is auriemma; How couldn’t he?

But then he leaned into the microphone.

“I really miss,” he said with a grin and grabbed. “I can’t say that out loud.”

Maybe even more roads to travel together – another 80 minutes gametime and the last trips on the ladder. There’s even more of the victory, and because Bueckers is Bueckers, he believes he can. And because Auriemma has spent a lot of time in the last five years, she must think she’s not wrong.

(Photos of Paige Bueckers and Geno Auriemma: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)