Every morning, Kia Nurse reads two pages of a book, specifically a nonfiction book. She reads two pages of that same book before she goes to sleep every night. It's a habit she picked up from her brother, Darnell Nurse, who plays in the NHL for the Edmonton Oilers. She would say that Darnell's tastes are a bit more advanced than her's, but it's the habit that matters. Each page turned and minute spent is a meditation that centers her spirit at the bookends of the day.
The practice keeps Nurse in the moment during a season fraught with reflections on certain last-second shots and questions about what her future holds.
"I'm opening a new chapter in my life," Nurse says, "so might as well open a new book and see what it says."
The senior is keenly aware that she faces more questions than answers at this moment. She doesn't know where she will play next year or where she will live. She has no control over those answers; she only has this moment: her last March as a UConn Husky.
Nurse -- whose Huskies face fifth-seeded Duke on Saturday (ESPN, 2 p.m. ET) in the Sweet 16 -- closed the book on Morgan William and Mississippi State the minute she left the American Airlines Center after UConn's Final Four loss last April. It's not that she doesn't think about William's shot or how last season didn't end the way she and her teammates wanted it to. The media is always bringing it up anyway.
"It's something that you need to keep in the front of your mind and use as motivation to help you get through every day," Nurse says. "It needs to be remembered."
But she doesn't even mention William's name or Mississippi State. She talks about "what happened last year." That loss was just the second of her career with the Huskies, and if she gets her way, it will be the last.
Sitting in a meeting room in the Huskies' practice facility, the Werth Family UConn Basketball Champions Center, Nurse wears a bright red Canada jumpsuit. She says it was just something she had lying around. That is probably true, but it is also the middle of the Winter Olympics, and Nurse is a proud Canadian.
Werth is filled with Husky history. Banners celebrating the accomplishments of UConn greats hang on the walls of the practice gym: All-Americans, players of the year, Olympic gold medalists. It is a constant reminder of the expectations for each UConn team -- expectations that, last year, Nurse says she did not meet.
After last season, Nurse got back in the gym. She spent hours over the summer tweaking her shot. She shoots the ball a little higher now and takes less of a hop. She shot 46.2 percent from 3-point range last year but felt that her shooting was inconsistent. Though Nurse's shooting percentage is slightly down this season (45.1 percent), she feels as if she isn't going long stretches without connecting. She went 0-for-3 from 3-point range in the opening round against Saint Francis (Pennsylvania), but hit 3-of-5 3-pointers in the second round against Quinnipiac.
"She wasn't a great 3-point shooter when she got here, and now she's as good as anybody in the country," UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. "She knew exactly what she wasn't really good at, and she got better at it."
That willingness to assess her strengths and weaknesses and then address them is a cornerstone of Nurse's personality as a player. Reading nonfiction books is a meditative exercise, but it is also a point each day when she is considering her leadership style and asking how she might get better. She has worked on her passing, her shooting, her defense. She works hard every day. She gets an opportunity and seizes it. It's how she became a member of the Canadian national team that beat the U.S. women for gold at the 2015 Pan-American Games. She led Canada in scoring that game.
Nurse is never concerned with the stat sheet, instead measuring herself by effort and whether she has done her job for the night. Against then-No. 4 Louisville on Feb. 12, Nurse was tasked with guarding Asia Durr. Louisville's leading scorer might have gotten 20 points on her, but they didn't come easy. Durr shot 3-for-12 from beyond the arc and 7-of-19 overall, failing to score until halfway through the second quarter. UConn got the win 69-58, and Nurse did her job. The four points she scored by leaking out early on the fast break were just gravy.
On senior night, Nurse belts the Canadian national anthem from the court at Gampel Pavilion before tipoff against South Florida. It's the first time Nurse has heard her country's national anthem at Gampel.
"I was like, 'Maybe they'll love me enough to play it,' and they did," Nurse says with a laugh.
The game is never really in question. UConn rolls to a 82-53 victory. Nurse puts up 10 points and shoots 2-of-2 from 3-point land. It's a quiet performance that has become the standard for Nurse, whose impact is found in the leadership she provides her teammates. It's the clapping encouragement for the team to buckle down on defense and the made 3-point basket from the corner when UConn needs it. It's the wink she gave Katie Lou Samuelson before tipoff in the 2016 Final Four because Samuelson was a nervous freshman and Nurse knew how to make her laugh.
"She's been that role model for me that I have followed and learned from," says Samuelson, a junior. "It's kind of crazy to think about how she's going to be gone. I don't know what I'm going to do."
Nurse, projected as a late first-round pick in some WNBA mock drafts, is about to enter the phase of her career when she spends the most time playing. College is different. There is a clock counting down her remaining days in a Husky uniform, ticking away the moments remaining for redemption.
She plans to make the most of it.