Undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the nation since the preseason polls in October, Duke eagerly welcomed defending national champion Connecticut and its NCAA-record 58-game winning streak into its home arena for the first time Saturday night. The game offered the Blue Devils a chance to make a statement confirming their rise from also-ran to national contender.
Instead, the Huskies made a statement of their own.
UConn rudely greeted the first sellout crowd ever to fill Cameron Indoor Stadium for a women's game by dominating the opening half of play and taking a 41-20 lead into the halftime break. The Huskies would go on to push their lead to 28 points with 14 minutes remaining before a frenzied Blue Devil comeback cut the lead to just six, 71-65, with 45 seconds left on the clock.
The comeback fell short, however. Connecticut triumphed 77-65, the Blue Devils having simply too much ground to make up after the Huskies' overwhelming first half.
"I know our defense is good, but it was better than good in the first half," UConn head coach Geno Auriemma said. "We had a game plan going in, and sometimes plans go awry, but this time the plan worked to perfection."
From the sideline, that plan appeared to include coming into Cameron Indoor Stadium with the intent to bully the No. 1 team in the nation on its home floor, a notion UConn center Jessica Moore confirmed.
"Exactly," she said. "We just wanted to get there and throw the first punch, really come out there and hit them. They probably weren't ready for that."
Saturday's contest featured the highly anticipated showdown between Duke All-American Alana Beard and her counterpart Diana Taurasi.
Widely considered the best two players in women's collegiate basketball, Beard and Taurasi made their presences felt from the opening tip. After Beard opened up the scoring with a driving lay-up--picking up the ball after Taurasi dribbled off her knee--Taurasi immediately answered with a basket of her own.
"In the first half, we played the worst basketball that we could have played," Beard said. "I don't think we were at all relaxed. We weren't being the aggressor at all."
Finishing with 17 points and seven turnovers, Taurasi's statistics paled to those of Beard, who shined with a game-high 26 points and eight rebounds. Taurasi made huge contributions at two key points in the game, though.
First, she hit two fading three-pointers to jump start the Huskies to an early 10-point lead, igniting their first half supremacy. Then, with Duke down just 62-53 with 3:32 left to play, UConn called a timeout to rally itself, after which Taurasi stepped out and sank back-to-back jumpers, pushing her side back into a position of control.
"So much is made of the buildup between two players like they are just going to play one-on-one, and everybody else is going to watch," Auriemma said. "The games are usually won by the other guys on the team, but what they need is a sense of stability on the floor."
In Beard's case, however, the game literally was going to be won or lost based on her individual contribution. She brought back Duke from its 28-point deficit almost single-handedly, relentlessly slashing to the basket and either finishing with a basket or drawing enough defenders where her teammates could score off offensive putbacks.
Beard scored 21 of her 26 points in the second half, and was the only player from either side to play the entire 40 minutes. Still, Beard could not do enough by herself, and despite her frequent attempts to get her teammates involved, she nonetheless finished with six turnovers against no assists.
Duke head coach Gail Goestenkors acknowledged that for all her quality depth, her team defers to Beard entirely too much. She added that the Blue Devils needed more consistency out of Iciss Tillis, a preseason first-team All-ACC forward, who finished with just nine points and five turnovers.
"We can't rely on one person, and we've done that in a couple of games," Goestenkors said. "We're not going to be as successful as we want to be unless we've got at least two people. Iciss needs to really step up for us in every game.... She's someone now that we need to be able to rely on night in and night out."
Although the Blue Devils took the floor with a truly raucous crowd behind them-Auriemma cited Cameron as the loudest arena in which he'd ever coached-Duke failed to match Connecticut's intensity up until the final 14 minutes.
The Huskies' fire appeared to come directly from the charismatic Auriemma, who, even with his team up 27 points early in the second half drew a technical foul after responding to a loose-ball foul called on Taurasi.
Auriemma engaged an official in a short-lived discussion that earned him the T, and then went apoplectic, needing several assistants to guide him back to the Connecticut bench. He was hardly recalcitrant.
"I don't care whether we're up 20 or down 20, that was a horrible call," he said. "All the calls were starting to become horrible because people start to officiate like it's the scoreboard: 'These guys are up 25, what difference does it make?'"
Although perhaps strange to the Cameron faithful, Auriemma's outburst didn't faze any of his players.
"You have to totally trust him because he's been through everything," Moore said. "He's seen 20-point leads [disappear], and then you lose. So, whatever he's saying we just take it to heart."
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