Women’s NCAA final a battle of overtime survivors in semifinals
Arike Ogunbowale #24 of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish is congratulated by her teammates after hitting the game winning basket to defeat the Connecticut Huskies in overtime in the semifinals of the 2018 NCAA Women's Final Four at Nationwide Arena on March 30, 2018 in Columbus, Ohio. Credit: Getty Images / Andy Lyons
For the second straight season, an epic last-second shot in overtime has taken center stage at the women’s Final Four.
Arike Ogunbowale’s jumper from the right wing just inside the three-point line over the outstretched arm of Napheesa Collier with one second remaining in overtime lifted resilient Notre Dame to a 91-89 win over rival Connecticut in the second national semifinal in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday night. Notre Dame’s win snapped Connecticut’s 36-game winning streak and denied the Huskies a shot for the program’s 12th national title.
It was just a year ago that Morgan William’s buzzer-beating pullup jumper over Gabby Williams gave Mississippi State a stunning 66-64 win over Connecticut in a national semifinal, arguably the greatest upset in women’s college basketball history. The Bulldogs snapped Connecticut’s 111-game winning streak and ended the Huskies’ quest for a fifth straight national title.
But there’s still one game to go. And it is certainly fitting that Notre Dame and Mississippi State will play for the national title on Sunday night.
“Any time you beat Connecticut, because of the dominance of their program, it’s just such an emotional win,” Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw said Saturday. “It makes it really hard to kind of get back to work. You feel like that should have been the championship game. We should be going home right now.
“So it is, it’s a lot of emotion. It’s a lot of adrenaline. It’s a lot just, you know, on the mental part of your game. So it really is hard to come back and try inform gather yourself just with one day in between. Not a lot of time.”
Notre Dame, seeking its second national title, has been a very resilient team all season. The Irish have had to overcome four ACL injuries to key players over the course of the season. McGraw, the national coach of the year, has done perhaps the greatest job of her career with the depleted roster.
“We actually didn’t really talk about it at all,” McGraw said Saturday about the injuries. “We just constantly focus on what we have, what we can do, who’s going to step up, how are the roles changing? What do you need to do now? We never even talked about where we could be or what we should be thinking. We just kept focusing them on the future.”
Mississippi State also needed overtime to earn a spot in the national title game, beating Louisville 73-63 in Friday night’s first semifinal. It will be the Bulldogs’ second consecutive appearance in the national championship game as they try to win the program’s first title. William’s shot got Mississippi State to last season’s national title game, but the Bulldogs lost to Southeastern Conference foe South Carolina, 67-55. The Bulldogs feel that they have unfinished business.
“We have a saying: ‘One more,’ ” Mississippi State coach Vic Schaefer said Saturday morning. “We’ve got one more. But also the one more means one more when you’re playing — one more rebound, one more toughness play, one more charge, one more steal, one more stop, one more — it’s just one more. It’s going to take a one more for somebody. And so for us it’s . . . I think that’s where we are right now, it’s one more.”
