In their nearly three decades being the best team buzzard's luck can buy, the Stanford Cardinal women have lost their last game 28 consecutive times, all in the NCAA Tournament, one time early, most times in the middle, 10 times in the final weekend. A lot of superb players and teams have made that sad trek back to the locker room, finding honor through solace and wondering if at the very tip-top of a rapidly evolving game, they lacked something that the Connecticuts and Tennessees and Baylors and a growing crop of planning-to-stay upstarts seemed to have.
So they did what any perpetual power would do. They made it harder on themselves. Or to be honest, the virus helped make it harder on them.
So if they want to raise a banner to this national championship, the one they won by beating the very upstartiest Arizona Wildcats, they may want to list the final score as Stanford 20, COVID 19.
Maybe this shorts Arizona a tiny bit, since they scared the hell out of the Cardinal throughout a tensely ragged game, 54-53, but this Stanford team spent the last four months on the road because of virus restrictions imposed by Santa Clara County. Now that's quarantine with some sting in its tail. And still they kept winning, leading head coach Tara VanDerveer to the Final Four, the place that had eaten her soul so many times since 1992, and damned near made her the blue plate special again. Her teams had lost in New Orleans, Minneapolis, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Tampa, St. Louis, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Denver, Nashville and Dallas, so becoming the first team in college basketball history to win both the semifinal and final games by one point was very much in keeping up the brand. You wait almost three decades, longer than any coach in any other sport to go between championships, and then it gets hard.
The players — Final Four MVP Haley Jones as the first among an ensemble cast that would do the 2015 Warriors proud — are always placed at a disadvantage in remembering college teams because they come and go so quickly, and then come back again as civilians waiting with blood-fingered anticipation to see their descendants do what they could not. This team still has most of its players returning, but nobody would be fool enough to presume a repeat, certainly not this soon. But this is a moment for them that has been multiplied 11 times. They weren't the best team never to win a title, but they are the best team never to have won a title in the lives of any of its current players. Twenty-nine years is a ridiculous amount of time in airports regretting that last game, and 29 years bring a lot of tears from a lot of faces trying to push that stone up that muddy hill.
So while Jones and Anna Wilson and Alyssa Jerome and Cameron Brink and the Hull twins and Kiana Williams and Ashten Prechtel and… well, it's all of them, really… can reflect on a year's hard work until trying circumstances, what they've actually done is spit in a history book and slam it shut. It takes a lot to get to the final stage, a lot more to keep doing it, and a ridiculous level of endurance to miss so many times and not start feeling like the Dodgers of the '50s, the Lakers of the 60s, the North Carolina Tar Heels of the '70 and the Braves of the '90s.
The new millennium has provided us with lots of teams that waited a long time to win (Cubs 108 years, White Sox 88, Red Sox 86, and blah blah blah), so Stanford's persistence through so many close calls should be included among them, with oak leaf clusters to signify the sheer tonnage of torture between 1992 and Sunday night. When VanDerveer said this championship should come with an asterisk not because it was tainted but because it was bizarre, she was right. Nobody else will be waiting this long to do this the way it was done ever again.
At least you'd like to think so. COVID may have lost to Stanford Sunday night, but it is an elite program now, and is likely to remain so for years. Just a warning, is all. Making plans for the future is still the best way to make God laugh, but for the first time in forever, the right now is plenty enough for the Stanford women's basketball team — even if it was only by the thickness of two rims on two different nights.