When ugly is beautiful

The result was predictable, the game was anything but. The UConn women's unstoppable basketball powerhouse won its second consecutive championship, its 7th overall, and ran its unprecedented winning streak to 78 games. The foe was a familiar one, a Stanford Cardinal team that has met the Huskies in three consecutive Final Fours and holds the distinction of being the last team to emerge victorious. No slouches themselves, the Cardinals would be working on a tidy 59 game winning streak of their own if not for the pesky girls from Storrs. The two premier teams in the game whose combined 1 loss (and 0 to teams other than each other) was the fewest combined losses entering a championship game in history. Of course if you didn't know any of this you might have thought ESPN was airing a random high school girls basketball game when the halftime score sat at 20-12. 12!!!! This is the team that had annihilated every opponent by double digits for 77 consecutive games, and they had 12 points at halftime! In the previous 5 games of the tournament, they had surpassed 12 points by the 6 minute mark of each game. In the 25ish or so years Geno Auriemma has coached the team, the 12 points tied a record of ineptitude. After a tidy 26-7 spurt to start the second half, the Huskies found themselves in control and held on down the stretch. It was the lowest scoring national title game in history, but it still counts in the record books. Maya Moore won most outstanding player honors and deservedly so, but Tina Charles defense cannot be understated. All in all both teams played with grittiness and guts and all sorts of other adjectives you attach to shitty games when the play itself was so awful you need to justify talking about it afterward. Oh well, at least it was more exciting than the fucking Red Sox/Yankees game.