COLUMBUS, Ohio — The world may have been shocked, but Notre Dame knew.
The Fighting Irish knew before they took a 13-point lead near the end of the first quarter over a team that had yet to trail in the 2018 NCAA women's basketball tournament.
"They're deservingly favored—they win every game," junior Notre Dame guard Marina Mabrey told Bleacher Report before Friday's Final Four matchup. All questions before the team's Thursday practice appeared to center on how on earth the Fighting Irish were going to beat the undefeated UConn Huskies, a team so good it inspires concern-trolling that its excellence is a bad thing. "But we don't have anything to lose, so we should be the looser team here.
"We're not somebody you want to play in the Final Four."
NCAA Women's BKB@ncaawbbEPIC. https://t.co/ssRn2yqhJp
This isn't the first time this season Notre Dame had a chance to upset college basketball's Goliath. Notre Dame looked prepared to tarnish UConn's undefeated record in December after taking an 11-point lead in the fourth quarter, yet wound up losing by nine.
"We can't have mental lapses," Mabrey continued. "We went into the fourth quarter up 11, and we had a huge mental lapse. We just gotta stay focused on the task at hand—break it up into 10-minute spans. This 10 minutes is ours, then this 10, and this 10, and this 10. My favorite team to play is UConn."
"They have such a dominant program. You can't really argue with that," junior forward Maureen Butler told B/R. "If there is attention being brought to women's basketball, I'm happy for that, period."
"What they've done, first and foremost, you just have to respect it," said graduate transfer guard Lili Thompson. "When any team is succeeding and playing well, it's good for all of us. I feel like we had a really good showing against them, but it was really early in the season for us. Since then, we've gone through a lot with injuries, but we've also grown a lot as a team."
Notre Dame went into Friday's game with seven healthy players. On the bench were four—four—players recovering from ACL tears, easily identified by the long, dark scars on their knees. Yet, they still seemed to know what was coming. They knew long before they reclaimed the lead four separate times in regulation against what is widely known as the best program in women's college basketball.
"We've proven again and again that we can overcome so much, whether that's injuries or being down," Butler said Thursday before practice while Thompson studied for a finance exam in the next locker. She cites a January game against Tennessee that the Irish won by 14 after being down by as much as 23. "We have the grit—the mentality—to come back and to find our win."
"We got a little bit disrespected with people saying, 'Oh, they lost so many players,'" Mabrey added. "They thought we were going to get worn down and not be able to make it this far, but here we are—like it or not. We're here, and we're ready to get a championship."
Notre Dame knew things were different the day before the game, as the overwhelming mood in the locker room was chippy and confident. "We can score with anybody in the country," said Thompson. "We're playing some of our best basketball right now, so that's definitely a good feeling to have going into the game," Butler added.
The Fighting Irish knew things were different before UConn found a way to score five points in 21 seconds to send the game to overtime, all while Kobe Bryant watched from the stands wearing a Huskies hat.
UConn@UConn.@kobebryant knows 😏 #UConnNation https://t.co/muIMFwbuyP
And yes, they knew before Arike Ogunbowale, the 5'8" junior guard, pulled up from just inside the three-point line with two seconds left in overtime—after missing two free throws that would have given Notre Dame a near-insurmountable five-point lead, allowing the Huskies to hit a game-tying three-pointer with 29 seconds left. They knew, in spite of the impressive odds stacked against them, that they were going to beat UConn.
After the game, Thompson still couldn't talk about The Shot, Redux without letting out a scream of joy. “We're all just on the bench, watching in slow motion," she said. "But that's Rico, right? That's her shot. That's the moment that she's been playing for."
Jackie Young, a sophomore guard who ended the game with 32 points and 11 rebounds—"At the beginning of the game, they kept leaving me open," she said, still a little confused— agreed. "I was under the basket. I watched it the whole way in," Young told Bleacher Report. "We knew it was going to go in. They had a good chance at the end but…."
As players relived the game's final moments, freshman forward Danielle Patterson gleefully listed off the media members who were going to be "butthurt" by the upset. Someone told her she was going to become a meme. "Yeah, a winning meme," she replied, laughing. “Everyone talked about how many injuries we had all season, how we had four ACL tears, how you need ACL to spell miracle—but it wasn't a miracle. It was hard work. If we didn't have all this ACL stuff, we wouldn't be here, so we wouldn't change it for the world."
Before the game, Ogunbowale had just beaten Mabrey to 10,000 Instagram followers. "If we beat UConn, you'll definitely get to 10K," the game-winning shot-maker told her teammate at the time. After the win, Mabrey checked her Instagram, and it turned out her teammate's prediction was as accurate as her jumper—she'd cracked five digits. But her primary focus, as it was before the team upset UConn, was the next game.
"We just want to win a national championship,” said Mabrey. "Hats off to UConn, they're a great team—but we're better."
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