Paige Bueckers and UConn’s Journey to a Fairytale Ending
TAMPA, FLA. — In the world of women’s college basketball, few names resonate as powerfully as Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, and Breanna Stewart. These UConn legends found themselves gathered at the UConn Huskies‘ team hotel after a heart-wrenching loss in the 2022 national championship game to South Carolina. Their mission? To console the Huskies and, in particular, Paige Bueckers.
The defeat was not just a loss; it was a historic moment. It marked UConn’s first loss in a national title game after 11 previous wins, extending the school’s championship drought. Yet, the alumni were there to remind Bueckers, then a sophomore, that such heartbreaks are part of the journey.
“[The titles] never come without some really trying times,” Bird recalls telling Bueckers and teammate Azzi Fudd. “Even if you go 39-0 in a season, it still wasn’t perfect.” Bueckers’ time at Storrs was indeed impressive but far from perfect. Her freshman year was overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and she missed significant time due to knee injuries, including a torn ACL in summer 2022. Despite reaching the Final Four three times, she fell short each time—until now.
In her final game as a Husky, Bueckers finally captured that elusive national title. She scored 17 points and grabbed six rebounds in an 82-59 victory over defending champion South Carolina, securing the accolade missing from her résumé and ending UConn’s nine-year title drought.
The past five years for Bueckers and UConn have been a shared pursuit of that coveted championship, marked by setbacks and comebacks. “When you lose at UConn, it’s like the world is ending,” Stewart told ESPN. “[We knew] that they were going to get it. It took a little bit longer, but they got here today.”
The journey was challenging, but the ending was perfect. “It’s truly storybook,” said Rebecca Lobo, who, like Bueckers, won her first and only national championship with UConn in her final career game. “For her and the journey that she’s had, what she’s been through, I think, too, it means so much because of all the trials and tribulations she’s had along the way.”
The culmination of this tumultuous and rewarding journey was captured in a 10-second hug between Bueckers and coach Geno Auriemma as she checked out of the game for the last time. It was the first time Auriemma had seen Bueckers cry, and he told her, “I love you.” Later, Auriemma couldn’t hold back his tears, calling this “one of the most emotional Final Fours and emotional national championships I’ve been a part of since that very first.”
“[Bueckers’] journey,” he said on ESPN’s postgame show, “has been the most incredible for any kid I’ve had.”
From High School Dreams to Collegiate Triumph
Nearly six years before Bueckers cut down the nets in Amalie Arena, she was a high school junior visiting Tampa for the 2019 Final Four with USA Basketball. Just days after announcing her commitment to UConn, her dream school, she envisioned winning championships and restoring the Huskies to their former glory.
Bueckers’ arrival at UConn was seamless. With a swagger and on-court dominance, she took the college basketball world by storm, becoming the first freshman to win multiple national player of the year awards. She led the Huskies to the Final Four, but after an upset by Arizona in the national semifinal, it seemed time was on her side.
However, the middle chapters of Bueckers’ career taught her that nothing could be taken for granted. She missed 19 games due to a tibial plateau fracture and meniscus tear as a sophomore, later admitting she returned too quickly. After tearing an ACL, she sat out her entire junior season.
Bueckers endured nearly two years of rehab, often masking her anguish. She completely altered her approach to the game, prioritizing better nutrition, embracing Pilates, and working with renowned performance enhancement specialists. She leaned into her faith, believing there was a reason for her obstacles.
Even after returning to the court in November 2023, things were far from smooth. Last season took a toll as the Huskies faced a slew of season-ending injuries. By the postseason, Bueckers was playing some of the best basketball of her career, but the weight of expectations was heavy.
“I was so worried about all that could go wrong,” Bueckers said, “that you can’t even do anything right,” which all came to a head in the 2024 Final Four when the Huskies fell to Iowa by two.
A New Mindset and a Championship Season
This past season, Bueckers’ fifth in the program, was different. With the help of a sports psychologist and Auriemma’s guidance, she learned to stay present, not be outcome-oriented, and find peace with herself. She embraced running her own race and not letting pressure become a burden.
In the lead-up to Sunday, Bueckers wasn’t consumed by the fear of losing. Even before being crowned a champion, she said she wouldn’t change a thing about her journey, making Sunday’s emotions all the stronger.
“You recognize the things that you’ve overcome to get to this point, and you feel like it’s all been worth it,” she said. “Just an overwhelming sense of gratitude for everything that’s happened through the ups and downs. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. And to be rewarded with something like this, you can’t really even put it into words.”
The Legacy of a Champion
The 12 national championships Auriemma has won over 40 years of coaching don’t alter his thinking: Winning is hard, and it requires so much to break your way.
For most of Bueckers’ career, he believed that little worked in her favor. Her time in Storrs overlapped with the program’s most snakebitten stretch in decades: Since Bueckers’ sophomore year, UConn players have sustained 12 season-ending injuries. Bueckers and Fudd, recruited to be the most potent backcourt pairing in the country, appeared in just 17 games together before the 2024-25 campaign. It was a stretch Fudd described as having “bonded [the team] through trauma.”
Even when the Huskies reached the Final Four during Bueckers’ sophomore and redshirt junior years, it wasn’t with a group Auriemma thought was healthy enough to win it all. That’s what bothers the coach most about these past few seasons. For as sensational as Bueckers had been, Auriemma maintained she couldn’t lift UConn to a championship alone.
Finally, in her last season, the stars aligned. For the first time in years, Auriemma believed UConn was playing at full strength. “We kind of have a chance to be able to manipulate the game a little bit better than we had before — that’s rewarding,” he said. “That makes up for all the heartache and all the trauma and tribulations that we have had to go through.”
Fudd enjoyed her healthiest season since arriving at UConn, playing twice as many games (34) as she had in the previous two seasons combined (17). Freshman Sarah Strong emerged as one of the best players in the country, forming a formidable trio with Bueckers and Fudd.
The emergence of this UConn team was a slow burn, particularly after early losses to Notre Dame and USC and a stunning February upset at Tennessee. But 10 days after looking like a shell of themselves in Knoxville, the Huskies showed their potential by demolishing South Carolina by 29 points on Feb. 16 in Columbia.
“About two months ago, this team fell in love with each other,” Auriemma told ESPN’s Holly Rowe. “At first they would play, it was like, ‘Yeah we like each other, we like each other a lot.’ … I think after the Tennessee game, they fell in love with each other, with the process, with ourselves as a group, and they started liking their coaches. I’ve never been happier than I’ve been the last couple of months coaching a team.”
Playing with a new mindset, Bueckers saved some of her best performances for her final NCAA tournament, scoring 105 points across the second round, Sweet 16, and Elite Eight, the most points scored in any three-game stretch by a UConn player. She and the Huskies breezed through the tournament in such dominant fashion because of Auriemma’s mastery at getting his teams to peak at the right time.
Everything was coming together for a fairytale ending. Amid his usual nerves, Auriemma kept the faith.
“I don’t think the basketball gods would take us all the way to the end [only for UConn to not win],” Auriemma said. “They’ve been really cruel with some of the kids on this team. They’ve suffered a lot of the things that could go wrong in their college careers as an athlete. … So they weren’t going to take us here and give us more heartbreak.”
A Legacy Cemented
It was 30 years ago Wednesday that the Huskies celebrated their first national championship by beating Tennessee in Minneapolis’ Target Center. They thought they might get their full-circle moment back in 2022, when Bueckers, a Hopkins, Minnesota, product, returned to the state for her second Final Four. But it instead came three years later in the Sunshine State, when that Minnesota kid delivered the Huskies back to the mountaintop in her final collegiate basketball game, riding into the sunset a champion.
Auriemma tried to posit that Bueckers didn’t need a championship to be considered one of the program’s all-time greats, that her individual play and ability to lift all those around her elevated UConn to heights it wouldn’t have achieved without her. People debated what her legacy would be without a ring. But now that’s a moot point.
Sunday was her coronation. ESPN’s “The Bird & Taurasi Show” displayed after the game a graphic listing Bueckers’ collegiate accomplishments: three-time Big East player of the year, three-time unanimous first-team All-American, 2021 national player of the year.
- “All those don’t count,” Taurasi said. “Only thing that counts is she has a national championship. She is a champion. She will forever be in the record books.”
And she did it in her own way. After years of being pushed by Auriemma, even criticized by outsiders, to play more aggressively, she didn’t take over the game, nor did she need to. Fudd and Strong dazzled with a combined 48 points, and the team played the UConn way. Bueckers is known for her selflessness as a teammate, so it was fitting that she could celebrate in the background as Fudd was presented the Most Outstanding Player trophy.
“It’s destiny, and obviously I have a great faith, so I believe God planned it perfectly in the way that it went out,” Bueckers said. “It’s a great last showing of the great team basketball that we’ve been playing all season.”
Bueckers was the last player to cut down a piece of the net, twirling it around as she let out a roar. She departed the court for the last time in her collegiate career, surrounded by a throng of screaming UConn fans and with the rest of the net around her neck — enshrined as a national champion.
“There is something extremely validating about winning a championship. There is something about shutting people up when you win a championship,” Bird said. “I’d imagine, just given the roller-coaster ride that has been her career in terms of the injuries, I think this would just be such a warm, fuzzy-feeling way to end everything.”
Added Lobo: “When you get to the other side and look back, you realize sort of the perfection of it all. How many players end their career with a victory? Very few. It’s just sort of the incredible culmination of everything, the exclamation mark on everything that you’ve done.”
Originally Written by: Alexa Philippou
