After all the injuries and losses, Bueckers and UConn complete storybook journey

TAMPA, FLA. -- Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi and Breanna Stewart gathered at the UConn Huskies' team hotel following their alma mater's loss in the 2022 national championship game to South Carolina. The trio of UConn greats wanted to console the Huskies -- and Paige Bueckers.

The defeat was devastating, historic; the first loss in a national title game in program history after 11 previous wins and extending the school's championship drought yet another year. And yet, the alumni wanted to reassure Bueckers, then only a sophomore, that heartbreak like this was all part of the process.

"[The titles] never come without some really trying times," Bird recalls telling Bueckers and teammate Azzi Fudd. "Even if you go 39-0 in a season, it still wasn't perfect." Bueckers' tenure in Storrs, while undoubtedly impressive, has been far from perfect. Her freshman year was held in a bubble amid the COVID-19 pandemic. She missed over half her sophomore season and her entire junior year with knee injuries, most consequentially tearing her ACL in summer 2022. She reached the Final Four three times before this year -- including that 2022 national title game -- and fell short each instance.

Until now. In her final game as a Husky, Bueckers earned a national title, scoring 17 points and grabbing six rebounds in an 82-59 victory over defending champion South Carolina, securing the sole accolade missing from Bueckers' resume and snapping UConn's nine-year title drought.

The last five years for Bueckers and UConn have been defined by their shared pursuit of that coveted championship, with the common thread of getting knocked down and needing to find their way back up. Their destinies have long been intertwined, said Auriemma in 2023, while his star was still rehabbing from her ACL surgery. "Our story is her story and her story is our story in so many ways," he said. "Hopefully the story ends where she gets what she wants by giving us what we want."

The path might have been circuitous. The process might have been trying. But the ending for Bueckers and UConn? It was as perfect as it gets.

"It's truly storybook," said Rebecca Lobo, who like Bueckers won her first and only national championship with UConn in her final career game. For her and the journey that she's had, what she's been through, I think, too, it means so much because of all the trials and tribulations she's had along the way."

NEARLY SIX YEARS to the day before Bueckers cut down the nets in Amalie Arena, she was visiting Tampa as a junior in high school attending the 2019 Final Four for USA Basketball. It was just days after she'd announced her commitment to UConn, her dream school, where she envisioned winning championships and getting the Huskies back on top.

The pairing of Bueckers at UConn proved seamless. With a swagger to her game to pair with her on-court dominance, she took the college basketball world by storm as soon as she arrived in Storrs, becoming the first freshman to win multiple national player of the year awards. She propelled the Huskies to the Final Four, but even after they were upset by Arizona in the national semifinal, it felt that time was on Bueckers' and UConn's side.

But the middle chapters of Bueckers' career would teach her that nothing -- not time, not championship opportunities, and not even health - could be taken for granted. She missed 19 games with a tibial plateau fracture and meniscus tear as a sophomore, later admitting she forced her return too quickly. After tearing her ACL four months later, she sat her entire junior season.

Bueckers pushed through nearly two years of rehab, often masking her mental and emotional anguish. She completely altered her approach to the game and how she takes care of her body, prioritizing better nutrition, embracing Pilates and working with one of women's basketball's most renowned performance enhancement specialists. She leaned into her faith; she said that even if she didn't understand why this had happened to her, she believed there was a reason God handed her this obstacle.

Things went far from smoothly even once she returned to the court in November 2023. Last season took a toll on her as the Huskies confronted a new slew of season-ending injuries. By the postseason Bueckers was playing some of the best basketball of her career, back better than ever from her ACL, but the happy-go-lucky player was nowhere to be seen, replaced by someone feeling so much weight that she'd wake up on gamedays just wanting them to be over.

"I was so worried about all that could go wrong," Bueckers said, "that you can't even do anything right," which all came to a head in the national semifinal when the Huskies fell to Iowa by two.

This last year, Bueckers' fifth in the program, was different. With the help of a sports psychologist and Auriemma's continued guidance, she learned how to stay where her feet are. To not be so outcome-oriented. How to be more at peace with herself, to run her own race, and to not let the pressure amid ever-heightening expectations become a burden

And in the leadup to the title game, well before she was crowned a champion, Bueckers said that she still wouldn't change a thing about her journey with her teammates - "just because of how it shaped us and how it's shaped our mentality, how it shaped our faith and belief in everything that happens for a reason."

THE 12 NATIONAL championships Auriemma has won over 40 years of coaching don't alter his thinking: Winning is hard, and it takes so much out of your control to break your way.

For most of Bueckers' career, he felt that little worked in her favor. Her time in Storrs overlapped with the program's most snake-bitten stretch in decades: Since Bueckers' sophomore year, UConn has experienced 12 season-ending injuries. Bueckers and Fudd, who were recruited to be the most potent backcourt pairing in the country, appeared in just 17 games together prior to the 2024-25 campaign. It was a stretch that Fudd described as having "bonded [the team] through trauma."

Even while the Huskies found themselves in the Final Four Bueckers' sophomore and redshirt junior years, it wasn't with a group that Auriemma felt was healthy enough to have a real shot at winning it all. That's what bothers the coach most, he said this weekend, about how these last few seasons went. Because for as sensational as Bueckers had been, Auriemma has long maintained that she wouldn't be able to lift UConn to a championship -- and knock off the likes of the South Carolina juggernaut -- alone.

Finally, in her final season in Storrs, the stars aligned. For the first time in years, Auriemma felt like UConn was playing with a full deck. "We kind of have a chance to be able to manipulate the game a little bit better than we had before, that's rewarding," he said Saturday. "That makes up for all the heartache and all the trauma and tribulations that we have had to go through."

Fudd enjoyed her healthiest season since arriving at UConn, playing double the games this year (34) than she had in the previous two combined (17). Freshman Sarah Strong -- who announced her commitment to UConn one year ago on Sunday -- surpassed even internal expectations, emerging as one of the best players in the country and a superstar in her own right.

The Bueckers-Fudd-Strong three-headed monster reminded Auriemma, as early as December, of some of his other championship cores: Rebecca Lobo, Kara Wolters and Nykesha Sales; Breanna Stewart, Morgan Tuck and Moriah Jefferson; Renee Montgomery, Maya Moore and Tina Charles.

This emergence of this UConn team - which outside of Bueckers skews younger and inexperienced due to the team's spell with injuries -- was more of a slow-burn throughout the season, particularly after early losses to Notre Dame and USC (games where Fudd was limited or unavailable) and a stunning February upset at Tennessee. But 10 days after looking like a shell of themselves in Knoxville, they showed their first real glimpse of what they could be, demolishing South Carolina by 29 points in Columbia -- a harbinger of what was to come.

Bueckers saved some of her best performances for her final NCAA tournament, scoring 105 points across the second round, Sweet 16 and Elite Eight games, the most points scored in any three-game stretch by a UConn player.

It was a fitting indicator of Auriemma's mastery of getting his teams to peak at the right time -- and by the collective hunger given all the Huskies went through as individuals and all they went through together.

"I think a lot of us, our mindset is like, yes, we really want to win a national championship," Fudd told ESPN. "But I think most of us on the team are like, we want to do it for Paige."

The same goes for Auriemma. A 12th national title has little impact on his life, he said on Saturday. But it does have an enormous one on Bueckers'.

"Anytime you can have a hand helping someone who, when you were talking to them when they were 17 years old, about what could happen if you come to UConn and you're in a position to actually be able to do it," Auriemma said, "I think that's the most gratifying thing for me at this stage in my life."

IT WAS 30 years ago this past Wednesday that the Huskies celebrated their first national championship after beating Tennessee in Minneapolis' Target Center. They thought they might get their full-circle moment back in 2022, when Bueckers, a Hopkins, Minnesota product, returned to the state for her second Final Four. But it instead came three years later in the Sunshine State, when that Minnesota kid delivered the Huskies back on the mountaintop in her final collegiate basketball game, riding off into the sunset a champion.

Auriemma tried to posit that Bueckers didn't need a championship to be considered one of the program's all-time greats, that her individual play and ability to lift all those around her elevated the Huskies to heights it wouldn't have achieved without her. People debated what her legacy would be without a ring. But now it's a moot point.

Sunday was her coronation, and Bueckers' lasting mark is that she did it in her own way. She overcame injuries that would have knocked many off course. Amid an ever-growing spotlight in the sport, she found comfort in who she is, as a player and as a person. She grew from those devastating losses to Arizona, to South Carolina, to Iowa, all of those failures making the ultimate success that much sweeter.

"There is something extremely validating about winning a championship. There is something about shutting people up when you win a championship," Bird said. "I'd imagine, just given the roller coaster ride that has been her career in terms of the injuries, I think this would just be such a warm, fuzzy-feeling way to end everything."

Added Lobo: "When you get to the other side and look back, you realize sort of the perfection of it all. How many players end their career with a victory? Very few. It's just sort of the incredible culmination of everything, the exclamation mark on everything that you've done."