NCAA women battle it out courtside: Champions indeed

If you missed the NCAA Women’s Championship game pitting Baylor University against Notre Dame, you really missed something special. It was a game of ebbs and flows, elation and heartbreak, courage and luck — pretty much everything you could ask for in a basketball game.

Just as is always the case, though, the game was really about people, and I would like to highlight two special players.

The first is Lauren Cox of Baylor. She is a dominant power forward at 6’4” with very good technical and leadership skills. Every woman on her team respects her for playing, and playing very well, even though she has type I diabetes and has to have her blood sugar monitored and adjusted constantly. She now wears a computerized monitor on her arm which checks her sugar levels and a pump which administers insulin as it is needed. She went to this method after having to go to the hospital on a team trip to UCLA when she experienced life threatening complications stemming from her condition.

For the first two and a half periods she was the dominant player and the main reason why Baylor was able to build, at one point, a 17 point lead. The championship trophy was almost in her grasp.

Then fate took a hand, and things changed both for her and her team. Both she and Kalani Brown, her 6’7” teammate, went up for a rebound. Cox got her leg tangled up in Brown’s, and Cox went to the floor with a serious knee injury. She was out of the game, and it looked like Baylor might be out of luck.

On the other side of the floor, Arika Ogunbowale started to really find her groove, and the points just started pouring in. Ogunbowale is noted for being an icy shooter who wanted the ball at any opportunity. If you were a Notre Dame fan, and you needed someone for a final shot, she would be your shooter.

So, after Cox went out in the third quarter, Notre Dame clawed its way back, primarily on the shooting of Ogunbowale. In the fourth quarter the game was tied several times, and Notre Dame actually led once or twice.

The game came down to the final seconds with Baylor leading 82-80. A foul was called under the Notre Dame basket with virtually no time left, and guess who was at the line. Ms. Ice Water herself. Everyone figured she would tie it up, and the game would go into overtime.

Except she missed the first shot! Of all the things running through the coaches’ minds at that point, her missing would not have been among them.

Now she had to deliberately miss the second shot in such a way that her teammates could rebound the ball and put it in for the tie. Instead, the shot went in, and Baylor won the game 82 to 81.

This ranks as one of the best basketball games I’ve ever seen. It had everything: heartbreak, jubilation, pathos, irony, skill, luck and great satisfaction. I hope you had a chance to enjoy it as well.

Millerton resident Theodore Kneeland is a retired teacher and coach.