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UConn Holds Off Notre Dame To Claim 10th National Title
- Updated: April 8, 2015
Breanna Stewart led UConn’s women’s basketball team through a gantlet of cameramen to their locker room at Amalie Arena about 90 minutes before tip-off the national championship game on Tuesday.
Senior forward Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis took over when it mattered most during the game, leading all scorers with 15 points and UConn’s most important two shots of the game.
Stewart, the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player as a freshman and sophomore and AP performer of the year, was truly outstanding again, with eight points, 15 rebounds and four blocked shots, but Mosqueda-Lewis provided the decisive blows for the Huskies as UConn prevailed 63-53 in a slog against a Notre Dame team that can only become more of a heated rival.
For Connecticut, and coach Geno Auriemma, it was a 10th national title. Auriemma is 10-0 in championship games.
“These kids right here,” Auriemma told ESPN in a postgame interview, “I know we’ve won a lot of these, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been more proud of a group of kids.
“I didn’t trust them at the beginning of the season … especially after that Stanford game. I didn’t trust them one bit. Each day, each week, we just kept growing and growing.”
The loss to Stanford was the only one for the 38-1 Huskies, who closed the season with 37 consecutive wins. Connecticut is 78-1 in the past two seasons.
Struggling offensively in a low-scoring game, the Huskies led by just five points with six minutes left, before Mosqueda-Lewis hit a three-pointer trailing in transition and then a jumper near the foul line for a 61-50 lead with 4:06 remaining.
UConn exhaled, Notre Dame sighed and the Huskies spent the rest of the game making a close game look otherwise. This was not the 41-point blowout UConn had crafted on average in going 38-1 this season.
The Huskies defeated the Irish for the second time this season and in consecutive national titles games. In a contest between the undisputed upper strata of the game the past six seasons — UConn has won 221 games in the span, Notre Dame a next-best 203 — the Huskies were a level above when it mattered. More important, Connecticut has won three consecutive titles and five in seven years while Notre Dame has not won a title since 2001 despite advancing to five consecutive Final Fours and the final four times in five years.
UConn has won three consecutive titles for the second time, replicating its run from 2002-04. Tennessee was the first, from 1996-98. There are no obvious signs of this stopping.
