DALLAS-He smiled. When one of the greatest winning streaks in the history of sports and one of the greatest games in the history of women's basketball had ended, Geno Auriemma smiled.
Starting her legendary move from barely inside half court with three seconds left in overtime, Morgan William, the littlest player with the biggest heart, sliced through Kia Nurse and Saniya Chong. William pulled up a foot inside the foul line and just to the right of the foul lane.
Gabby Williams, who had played so heroically with four fouls on this Dallas night and had blocked William's shot at winning the game in regulation, leaped. Nobody in the women's college game leaps like Williams, but even she couldn't get to this rising ball.
Swish. Buzzer. Bedlam.
Heartache.
A rush of Mississippi State players tackled their 5-5 junior guard, the one they call Itty Bitty. Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, who played his college ball in Starkville, jumped up and down in the second row of American Airlines Center and beat his cap into the floor in joy.
"I was in shock," William said. "I'm still in shock."
"We beat the greatest team of all time with the best coach of all time," coach Vic Schaefer said.
Back home in Connecticut it was past midnight and already April Fool's Day, but this was no prank. A team that had lost to UConn by 60 points in the 2016 NCAA Tournament had done what most had seen as impossible.
"They deserved to win," Auriemma said. "They beat us.
"It's the worst feeling imaginable."
Yet as Auriemma walked toward Schaefer to shake his hand, there the UConn coach was, smiling. It was the damnedest sight.
"Things happen for a reason," Auriemma said after UConn's dreams of a 12th national title ended with this 66-64 loss. "I just kind of shook my head. This kid (William) has had an incredible run. When it went in, it was almost like, of course. Of course, it's going to go in.
"Look, nobody's won more than we've won. I understand losing, believe it or not. We haven't lost in a while, but I understand it. I know how to appreciate when other people win."
The littlest player had taken down the biggest, baddest team in women's college basketball history. She ended UConn's record winning streak of 111 games. She ended UConn's streak of four consecutive national titles. William has dedicated this spring to her late father who taught her the game she so loves. She scored 41 points to beat Baylor in the Elite Eight. Hit a lot of big shots.
"Ain't any bigger shots than the one she hit tonight," Schaefer said.
Ain't that the truth?
Yet there was a larger truth at work in the closing weeks of a season that had begun with many questions and appeared to be ending like so many UConn seasons. That, of course, was with the Huskies holding the national championship trophy aloft.
This team was beatable. Yes, extremely talented, yet young and beatable. And in the end, despite their 36-0 start, despite all their beautiful momentum, these Huskies were beaten. All those warnings that this team might not be ready to fully replace Breanna Stewart, Moriah Jefferson and Morgan Tuck were not idle chatter. They were truth.
"We didn't have the kind of maturity that you need to win at this level at this time of year," Auriemma said. "Some of our young guys got a little bit ahead of themselves.
"Normally, we're a little more patient on offense. I think we became a lot less patient. We started to try to make some individual plays. It was very disjointed, the whole first half. We usually had a tremendous flow. ... Maybe we were ready for everything except this."
Mississippi State pressured the ball. The Bulldogs sped up the game, disrupted UConn's rhythm. They didn't want UConn passing the ball around in a pretty ballet. They forced the Huskies to put the ball on the floor and create. On the offensive end, they had bigs like Teaira McCowan and Chinwe Okorie to pound inside, create all sorts of second-chance points and put people in foul trouble.
Williams, with 21 points, eight rebounds and four blocks, demonstrated superior athleticism. She created so much on her own. Sophomore Napheesa Collier struggled. Nurse, a junior, didn't have a great game. Sophomore Katie Lou Samuelson struggled for much of the night before making some big shots near the end. Ultimately, Chong, the only senior who played regularly, made the biggest blunder of them all.
"I've been talking about it all year," Auriemma said. "We've been playing way above our experience level. Tonight it caught up to us.
"I told them at halftime it was a miracle we were down eight. You know how many times this could have happened and didn't happen? The fact that it never happened doesn't mean I went home thinking, it's never going to happen. I thought this was coming at some point. I'm just shocked that it took this long to get here."
The Huskies fell behind by 16 in the first half and no time during the 111-game winning streak had they trailed by more than 11. Still, all the problems of the night stood to be erased with 26 seconds left. The Huskies had wiggled out of late trouble against Florida State, Maryland and Tulane this season to keep the streak alive. It looked as if it would happen one more time in the Final Four.
That's when Dominique Dillingham brought her arm up into Samuelson's throat in the lane. Samuelson went down to the floor in pain. After the video was reviewed a flagrant foul was assessed. Samuelson sank both free throws to tie the game and UConn got the ball back.
The moment looked to be UConn's after all.
And that's when Chong turned the corner off a screen at the foul line. There was still more than 12 seconds left on the game clock. She careened to the hoop off-balance and forced something, a shot that never elevated, an errant pass, something that went wildly out of bounds. The painful irony is, for much of the season, Chong led the nation in assists to turnover ratio.
"That wasn't Plan A," Auriemma said. "There's a kid trying to win the game. We go over that scenario a thousand times. It's the easiest thing to do. Look at the clock. Every day in practice we said, it's usually not the shot you take that makes it, it's the offensive rebound. We just want enough time for that.
"Saniya just tried to make a great play. God bless her. Just impatient a little bit, that's all."
When the Huskies eliminated Mississippi State in the Sweet 16 last year in Bridgeport, they were up 61-12 at halftime. That was the game that ignited the controversy of whether UConn was killing the sport with its brilliance.
As Auriemma said early on this season, a lot of teams would be looking for payback this season. The Bulldogs went back to Starkville. They hung No. 60 in the weight room.
"It was personal," said Victoria Vivians, who led the Bulldogs with 19 points.
Breanna Richardson said the same. Personal.
"We had our pride stepped on last year," Schaefer said. "We got our tail handed to us.
"This team has tremendous pride. They have tremendous heart. They're fighters. A year ago, I'm showing the Miracle (On Ice). This year I wasn't showing the Miracle. We weren't watching any movies. I wasn't talking about (David) slaying the giant."
Mississippi State got 21 more shots than UConn. The Bulldogs forced 17 turnovers. The Huskies had averaged nearly 25 assists. They only had 11.
"Our strategy was you can't let them do what they want to do," Schaeffer said. "There's not a lot of teams out there doing what we do defensively, trying to push you out, guard, all that. But that's the way we play."
Schaefer said he gave his team a choice of two plans.
"They said, 'Coach, we want to go get 'em,' " Schaefer said. "UConn is a well-oiled machine. If you don't put something in the sprocket to jam it up, it just keeps rolling."
So the team with no All-Americans shocked all of America by jamming the great machine, the beautiful machine. And then Itty Bitty rose up to slay the giant.
Geno could only smile.