INDIANAPOLIS—Hinkle Fieldhouse is full, double the size of the previous highest crowd this season. The Butler women have played basketball for 50 years, and this is their first sellout. The concourses have narrowed enough to flunk an EKG, closed by kids holding up signs and parents holding up cell phone cameras.
The Connecticut Huskies have come to town. And that still means something.
“Our players are used to this,” Geno Auriemma will say later, which of course they are. Before there was Caitlin Clark, there was the UConn traveling show, playing to big crowds wherever it roamed. Between Clark turning into Taylor Swift with a jump shot and the emergence of other marketable powers from South Carolina to LSU to UCLA, the women’s game has exploded and the Huskies have not had the main stage to themselves. Why, you’ve even needed two hands to count defeats in recent seasons and the NCAA has confirmed the rumor that it can actually hold a Final Four without Connecticut. Once in 16 tournaments, that is. And it has been eight years since the last national championship. In Huskies years that feels like about 30. Time enough for Auriemma to hit the big 7-0.
⛹️♀️ MORE WOMEN’S COLLEGE BASKETBALL ⛹️♀️
But there is a whiff of the glory days…
