Geno Auriemma said he was proud of his players and sounded like he meant it. With the top of his dress shirt unbuttoned as he spoke on the court, he looked like someone at the end of a long night of work. He looked like someone with reason to be proud of what had transpired.
Which is why Connecticut needs games such as this. And why the rest of the country does, too.
This time there was no shot at the buzzer, no upset to upstage the other news in sports. Unlike in the Final Four played in Dallas a year ago, No. 1 UConn got out of the Lone Star State with its unbeaten record intact Monday after a 75-71 win at No. 9 Texas.
On a night when little came easily, the Huskies found answers to win as the ensemble they are rather than as a team built around a singular presence such as Maya Moore or Diana Taurasi. As much as even close calls raise eyebrows when you've won 117 of your past 118 games, they arrived the No. 1 team, and they left the No. 1 team. But they left having been pushed in a manner that suggests, as one piece of the accumulating collection of evidence, that the rest of the country continues to figure out what to do with the questions Auriemma's program has asked for years.
Given a second look at an early 3-pointer in her fourth chance to beat the Huskies, Texas guard Brooke McCarty put the Longhorns in front in the opening minute. With a crowd of nearly 12,000 in support, they rode the early momentum and opened a double-digit lead before the game was seven minutes old. It was Texas that had the size and athleticism to get to rebounds and Texas that moved the ball well enough to produce assists on six of its first seven field goals.
Not quite three years ago, UConn beat Texas by 51 points in the NCAA tournament. The Huskies led that game by double digits after barely more than five minutes. The two programs met again in the tournament the next year. Texas trimmed the final margin to 21 points that time but still played uphill after ceding an early double-digit lead. Only last year, when the teams played in the regular season in Connecticut, did Texas avoid losing the game before it got to halftime. On Monday night, the Longhorns put themselves in position to be the aggressors.
To borrow a distinction made by Mississippi State as it prepared for the Final Four a year ago, Texas looked like it came out to play Connecticut -- not "UConn" and all that name's aura entails.
Even when the Longhorns slowed late in the first quarter and early in the second quarter, with the crisp ball movement giving way to some questionable shot selection, the mistakes were at least those of players with the confidence to take those shots. When UConn took its first lead since the opening minute, Texas answered with an 8-0 run. And it was UConn that looked hesitant, a state of affairs summed up when Crystal Dangerfield pulled up in transition early in the second quarter, pivoted back toward midcourt and threw a pass to the Texas bench.
It matters, then, that it was also Dangerfield involved in two of the biggest plays late in the game.
Able to play with the lead for much of the second half but never able to push that lead beyond a possession or two, UConn never had it easy. With the interior crowded with Jatarie White, Audrey-Ann Caron-Goudreau and, in cameos, Joyner Holmes, Napheesa Collier fouled out after totaling seven points and five rebounds. Elbowed inadvertently early in the game, Katie Lou Samuelson did well to play through that and score a team-high 19 points, but she worked for almost every one of her 12 field goal attempts and presented Texas with a chance to tie when she missed two free throws in the final minute. They couldn't save the day, not singlehandedly.
Yet for all its depth, Texas didn't have anyone who could consistently keep Azurá Stevens from driving to the basket. Given her reach and her Plastic Man-like ability to finish near the basket, no one in college basketball has a reliable answer for that. She scored 12 of her 16 points in the second half, a third of UConn's total points after the intermission.
The last of those came courtesy of an assist from Dangerfield with a minute and a half to play. With Gabby Williams stranded with the ball at the top of the key and Samuelson again unable to shake Lashann Higgs, Dangerfield came and got the ball, drove into traffic on the left side and floated a pass across the lane to Stevens for a layup and a 73-68 lead. Then, after Samuelson's missed free throws, Dangerfield hit two attempts with eight seconds to play to clinch the win.
Take out any of the parts -- even Collier hit a big 3-pointer during her otherwise frustrating night -- and it wouldn't have been enough. With all respect to the American Athletic Conference, UConn can find those consequences only in games such as these. That is why the team will travel to South Carolina in a few weeks and host Louisville in the middle of February.
The Huskies might win those games comfortably -- again, expectations of style points notwithstanding, UConn is 16-0 against a rugged schedule and the clear favorite to walk away with the title it missed out on a year ago. Or they might encounter more nights such as Monday.
The loss to Mississippi State reverberated throughout sports because after 111 consecutive wins by UConn, it felt like Buster Douglas beating Mike Tyson or the Americans beating the Soviets in hockey. But it wasn't a complete aberration. In a game not unlike the one in Austin on Monday, Maryland pushed UConn to the final minutes in the regular season a year ago. So did Notre Dame earlier this season, albeit in a game in which UConn was mostly without Williams and Notre Dame was entirely without Brianna Turner.
The sport is reacting to UConn. Not quickly. Not very often successfully. But reacting nonetheless. It is reacting because of people such as Karen Aston, who figured out how to win with less at North Texas and has successfully translated that into winning with all of the assets at her disposal in Austin. The Longhorns aren't just a collection of good recruits. That doesn't cut it when UConn provides such a clear standard to match. Like Texas, South Carolina under Dawn Staley and Louisville under Jeff Walz were shaped in UConn's shadow.
Shaped by the question: How do you beat that?
Some of this will always be about individual actors. Morgan William wasn't representative of any larger trend last spring. She was just a competitor used to playing against giants who played the best basketball of her life in the NCAA tournament, capped by the biggest shot the sport has seen in a long time. It felt for a time that Monday might play out the same way, with McCarty the kind of galvanizing presence with a penchant for big shots who might pull off something special. And who knows? Had her half-court runner at the end of the third quarter found net instead of rim, maybe Monday would have been another of those stories. Some nights those things happen.
Still, there was a reason Auriemma was proud of a performance so far from vintage.
He knows it's getting more difficult to be UConn. Slowly, yes. And not in conference play. But surely.