Here’s Patsy Takemoto, a teen-aged girl. She’s extremely bright and ambitious. She’s small of physical stature. She plays some high school basketball … well, the half-court game that they let the girls play.

She lives in a beautiful place, Hawaii, where her grandparents had come to from Japan in the 1800s to be sugar-plantation workers. But it’s not been a pretty world these last few, long years.  She’s been an eyewitness to the carnage at Pearl Harbor, which happened the day after she turned 14. War has raged over the globe, and people like her _ Japanese-Americans _ have been treated like the enemy by both sides in the conflict.

Her patriotism and her optimism, though, are undaunted. Soon, it will be time for the world, shattered in so many places, to begin rebuilding. She’s tiny but strong. It’s 1944. She’s graduated from high school and is eager to begin the next stage of education and step into adult life as a contributor, a healer.

She meets segregation, belittlement, contempt. For her race, for her gender. It’s relentless, mostly unchallenged, thoroughly institutionalized.  Yet she still thinks anything is possible.

But the medical-school application rejections keep piling up … one after another, after another, after another. No one, it seems, wants to teach women to be doctors.  How stupid was this? How unfair? How wasteful? How unproductive?

Look just at this country. All the jobs women had taken on, the talent they’d shown when given opportunity. They’d built planes and ships and tanks. In record time. They’d run businesses and paved roads and fixed cars … and still cooked meals and washed the clothes and kissed their children’s scrapes.   It had become an undeniable fact during World War II. Women really could do anything.

So was that all over when the war ended? Was that no longer necessary?

***

Now here’s Patsy Takemoto Mink, an aspiring attorney. She’s married a man named John Mink, had a daughter named Gwendolyn and gotten a law degree in Chicago when she’d been shut out of medical schools.  She and her family go home to Hawaii, where she has to fight to take the bar exam since technically she is a resident by marriage in her husband’s home state, Pennsylvania.  She wins this battle _ in effect establishing her own identity as a married woman _ then finds no law firms will hire her.

She starts her own firm and gets involved in politics. She’s elected to the Territorial House of Representatives in 1956 and is part of the movement toward Hawaii’s impending statehood, a goal that would be reached in 1959.  After two years in the Hawaii state senate, in 1964 she’s elected to the first of six consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Gwendolyn can see, by age 4, some of the discrimination that her mother has to deal with. By 6, she is “acutely” aware of it. By adolesence, it’s fully chrystalized for her.

But it’s a different world by the late 1960s and early 1970s, right?  The feminist movement has been gaining steam, barriers are coming down all the time. Even in that “male”‘ preserve, athletics.  A woman named Kathrine Switzer runs the Boston Marathon _ despite attempts to impede her _ in 1967. The first official collegiate basketball tournament for women is held at West Chester State in Pennsylvania in 1969.  Sure, it’s a different world.

Then Gwendolyn, an intense young scholar, gets a rejection notice from Stanford because the school already has “enough” women in her class.

***

Now here’s Congresswoman Patsy Mink. She knows how it works in Washington, D.C.: nothing comes without some compromise. She becomes effective in the system while staying steadfast in her beliefs.  She opposes the Vietnam War, sees education as a constant priority in spending, and advocates help for the people who are the poorest of the poor: women and children.

Opponents refer to her as “Patsy Pink,” their way of branding her a communist. But even the most antagonistic of them have to acknowledge she’s consistent in what she stands for. Maybe they don’t know how the rejections have motivated, not discouraged, her. Nor do they understand her empathy for others is a fuel for always standing up, no matter the opposition.

It’s 1972, and Congresswoman Mink is a member of the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee.  Incidentally, in her home state, the University of Hawaii that year is spending about $1 million on athletics _ just $5,000 of that for women’s club sports. The rest goes to the men.

Mink and another Democratic congresswoman, Edith Green of Oregon, author and co-sponsor Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972. Among its chief advocates in the Senate is Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh.  At the time, Mink and other Title IX supporters are thinking much more of opening and expanding educational opportunities for women. But how Title IX affects women and girls in sports will become a revolutionary part of the latter 20th century.

***

Now here’s the legacy of Patsy Mink.  She’d had her setbacks as a politician, losing both a run for the Senate and for the governorship of Hawaii. But that’s politics: You roll with defeats. She was re-elected to the U.S. House in 1990.  She had helped protect Title IX for almost 30 years. When it was weakened during the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s, Mink was one of the strategists who helped it get back its status.

Believing that under the current administration of George W. Bush, Title IX would face its most intense challenges since being enacted, Mink was preparing for the counter-attack.  But she passed away on Sept. 28 at age 74 of complications from pneumonia. After having served 24 years in the U.S. House, she posthumously won re-election in November.

President Bush signed a resolution renaming Title IX the “Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.”  We’ve given you a chronology of the obstacles and triumphs of Patsy Mink. But it’s only a brief sketch, really. Perhaps you can take time to type her name into a search engine on your computer. You’ll be amazed at the tributes and testimony you’ll find about her.  If you’re a women’s sports participant, coach or fan, you need to do this..

Millions of women and men have benefited from the work that Patsy Mink did for decades.  Women’s basketball has become the standard-bearer among women’s collegiate sports in this country, the one that gets the most funding, attention, praise and criticism.  By Jan. 31, a special commission studying Title IX will make a report to Education Secretary Rod Paige. What may happen in regard to Title IX in the next year should be followed closely.

Patsy Mink spent a lifetime in public service, but her vigilance has ended. Ironically and sadly, it seems she has never been more appreciated than now, when she’s gone.

The Patsy Takemoto Mink story, at its very core, is about how much one human can accomplish in a world of 6 billion, no matter how many obstacles are thrown in her or his way. Regardless of which side you fall on in Title IX debates or election booths, her story should inspire you.

Jones, of the Connecticut Sun, became the sixth UConn grad added to roster, meaning half the team are former Huskies. With Geno Auriemma coaching, the fact that he didn’t actually pick the team – it was done by a selection committee  - will get lost, ignored, or just flat-out not believed by those who are certain that it was his nefarious plot to stack the team with his former players.

The folks who are bugged by this aren’t likely to grumble much if at all about Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Tina Charles and Maya Moore. But they think Swin Cash and Jones are UConn overkill, so to speak, and not demonstrably better than a lot of other worthy candidates.

There is also the fact that Cash and Jones aren’t that necessarily all that different as players. Cash, now with Chicago, averaged 13.3 points and 6.9 rebounds last season with Seattle, hitting 39.6 percent of her shots from the field (28.5 percent from 3-point range.) Jones also averaged 13.3 points, grabbed 6.4 rebounds and shot 44.4 percent. The biggest statistical difference between them is Cash shoots the 3-pointer more (117 of 400 for her WNBA career) than Jones does (38 of 138).

National team director Carol Callan is the head of the committee; the other members are five-time Olympian Teresa Edwards, San Antonio Silver Stars coach/GM Dan Hughes, Indiana Fever GM/CEO Kelly Krauskopf, and WNBA executive Renee Brown.

It was obvious that Team USA wanted Baylor center Brittney Griner on the team, but when she pulled out of the running last week (that started the rumor mill again, unfortunately) the committee went with another post player.

Could that spot have gone to Phoenix’s Candice Dupree, who was on the World Championship team in 2010, or Minnesota’s Rebekkah Brunson, or a very young post, like this year’s top draft pick by Los Angeles, Nneka Ogwumike of Stanford?

Sure, it could have (although Ogwumike wasn’t on the list of 21 finalists USA Basketball released in February.) Frankly, I think the roster spot could go to Candace Parker’s almost-3-year-old daughter, Lailaa, and the Americans would still capture the gold.

I do simply accept that those who are annoyed about the “Huskies Half-Dozen” feel that way because, well … that’s just the way they are going to view this. And I’m not really fool enough to even try to talk them out of it, but …

I will say that at some point, folks really do need to trust that the committee/USA Basketball wants to do everything possible to win gold in London, and that that’s the bottom line for them. Not catering to Auriemma’s alumni party, as the critics will call it. Furthermore, Auriemma himself wants to do everything possible to win gold. He doesn’t want the United State’s Olympic winning streak – which dates back to the 1992 bronze-medal game in Barcelona – to end on his watch.

And while you could dub Team USA “Team UConn” for the Olympics, you could also name it the No. 1 Collection: seven of the players have been the top pick in the WNBA draft: Bird (’02), Taurasi (’04),  Seimone Augustus (’06), Parker (’08), Angel McCoughtry (’09), Charles (’10) and Moore (’11).

Two were No. 2 draft picks: Cash (’02 behind Bird), and Sylvia Fowles (’08 behind Parker).

Indiana’s Tamika Catchings was No. 3 in 2001; she couldn’t play that season after being injured as a senior at Tennessee. Seattle took Lauren Jackson first that year, and there’s no quibbling whatsoever with that. But now-defunct Charlotte took Kelly Miller No. 2. Nothing against Miller _ who, like sister Coco, continues to be a durable player in the WNBA _ but … sheesh. Catchings was more than worth waiting one season for. That was obvious even back then.

Jones (’02) and the other member of the U.S. team, Minnesota’s Lindsay Whalen (’04), were both No. 4 picks in the WNBA draft.

So here’s the final breakdown: the 12 Olympians represent five universities: UConn, Tennessee (two), LSU (two), Louisville and Minnesota. Auriemma either coached or coached against all of the Olympians when they were in college.

TAMPA, Fla. _ Remember the old “Schoolhouse Rock” tune?

“Figure eight as double four,
Figure four as half of eight,
If you skate, you would be great
If you could make a figure eight.”

Tennessee’s Pat Summitt has made a figure eight now as a basketball coach, but she’s never “skated” a day in her life. That got reinforced from her earliest consciousness, by parents she called “the hardest-working people I’ve ever known.”

The apple, as they say, didn’t fall far from the tree. Summitt – whose program now has eight NCAA titles after its 64-48 victory over Stanford on Tuesday _ is a long way from the farm girl who wondered if she’d ever measure up to her father’s unyielding standards.

She’s the million-dollar-a-year coach, the winningest in her profession, the Hall of Famer, a booked-to-the-gills speaker, a woman who’s spoken to multiple presidents of this country, a legend in sports.

But … then again, she’s not far at all from the fields she worked in as a child. That’s where it started. That’s where a part of her will always be.

“I think my childhood made me a tough strong woman,” Summitt said Tuesday, standing outside her winning team’s locker room. “That wasn’t always the accepted thing. Women weren’t supposed to be that strong, vocal.”

Summitt has taken teams to the NCAA Final Four 18 times, and you might think after all those interviews and press conferences, it would become rote. She would repeat the exact same things over and over; there would be nothing new to hear. But it’s really not like that.

She recalls stories and lessons from her life that sound fresh because they ARE fresh in her memory. Monday, Summitt talked about the day when her father left her in a hay field to do work she’d never done before. No instruction or encouragement. Just, “Do it.”

The father of five – Summitt is No. 4 and had three older brothers _ Richard Head didn’t mince words. He passed away in 2005, but he’s still with Summitt. Always. If you’ve read the two books that Summitt wrote with author and Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins, you know how much the unquenchable desire to please her father has fueled her.

What you may not realize, though, is that fuel truly burns constantly. It burns hot at times, and cooler at other times … but it always burns.

Summitt has a son, Tyler … but also many, many daughters. That’s how she views the players who have come to Tennessee and played for her. They stay in touch, they call and write, they visit. If they need Summitt, she’s there for them.

“She’s really like a mom – when you do something wrong, your mom is always there to correct you,” senior Alberta Auguste said. “When you do something right, your mom is there to cheer you on.”

Senior Alexis Hornbuckle said she arrived at Knoxville pretty sure of herself. She wondered why Summitt so frequently gave her a hard time. What was wrong with this woman? Why couldn’t just ease up? What was the big deal?

Then it began to sink into Hornbuckle what this was really all about.

“I realized if she wasn’t getting on me about improving,” Hornbuckle said, “then she’d pretty much given up on me.”

And that was far worse than any yelling.

“You know how when you’re a child, and your parents say, ‘I’m mad at you,’ and it doesn’t have the same effect as, ‘I’m disappointed in you’?”  Tennessee star Candace Parker said. “Coach will say that, and it just gets a rise out of me. Because you don’t want to disappoint Coach Summitt.”

Nobody stays this good this long without adjusting and changing. Summitt has talked over the years about the ways she’s different. If she’s “mellower” that’s really just a reflection that she’s smarter about how hard you need to push people to achieve their best without pushing them SO hard it becomes counterproductive.

Summitt has never thought she knows everything already. She’s still learning, still open to new ideas of how to do things better, still willing to listen.

Tennessee had no idea when it hired a 22-year-old to coach its women’s basketball program in 1974 that it was like striking oil. Summitt said she at the time that she didn’t even know if she COULD coach. She read books and asked for advice. She fretted about the fact that she was just a year older than some of her players. She feared she’d disappoint you-know-who.

Summitt recounted that phone call home after she’d coached her first game _ and lost. She was waiting for the hammer to come down from her father. But that’s when he said, “Let me tell you just one thing: Don’t take donkeys to the Kentucky Derby.”

He knew she could coach. Just he knew he could leave her in the field as a child and figure out how to do something she’d never done before.

“Sometimes people mistake who I am as a coach sometimes because of my intensity and my passion. But those kids – every one of them knows I love them. And every road to a national championship is very vivid and strong in my mind – each one.”

Each tournament, each team, each player. They’re all vivid. Just like the memories she has of standing in the Tennessee countryside, when she didn’t know how to do something … but figured it out.

Summitt always figures it out. She knows Dad would expect nothing less.

Let’s go back to the very beginning. The women’s hoops coaches of the newly formed Big 12 met with the media at a Kansas City-area hotel in October 1996. Some of them had been coaching against one another for many years at that point. Some were just getting to know the others.

“It’s kind of like in the ‘Brady Bunch,’ where the two families merge,” then-Nebraska coach Angela Beck said that day. “Like, ‘Here are your new brothers and sisters; you should love each other, even though you don’t know each other.”

I was new to Kansas City then, but not to the Big Eight, which merged with four Southwest Conference schools to form the Big 12. I grew up in Eastern Missouri following the Big Eight, then went to college at Missouri, where I covered women’s basketball as a student journalist.

After graduation, I worked in Tennessee, Missouri and Virginia before starting with The Kansas City Star and ESPN.com that fall 16 years ago, when women’s basketball was just coming off the big lift of the 1996 Summer Olympics.

One pro league, the ABL, would launch in 1996 but last only two full seasons. Another, the WNBA, began in June 1997 and has provided employment to several Big 12 players.

In 1996, the Big Eight had “died” without ever sending a team to the Women’s Final Four. Two of the Texas teams joining the new league both had NCAA titles: Texas and Texas Tech.

The Big 12 was a new animal, and not a completely welcome one throughout the Midwest. Nebraska, the main power broker in the Big Eight, was wary of an alliance with Texas in particular. And the Huskers were not pleased that the Big 12’s headquarters would be in Dallas, not Kansas City, which was the longtime home of the Big Eight.

The Nebraska-Texas chill never really thawed, and when the Huskers had a chance to switch to the Big Ten for the 2011-12 season, they did.

Of course, the genesis of the Big 12 _ and all the conference shakeups since _was about football. The decision to form the Big 12 wasn’t made to bolster women’s sports or make the league one of the showpieces of the progress of Title IX. Those ended up being fringe benefits, though.

Under the Big 12 banner, five teams have advanced to the Women’s Final Four: Oklahoma in 2002, ‘09 and ‘10, Texas in 2003, Baylor in 2005, ’10 and ‘12, and Texas A&M in 2011. The Lady Bears won the Big 12’s first NCAA hoops title in ’05, with A&M getting the second in ’11 and Baylor the third this year.

The national championships and Final Four appearances are mainly how the Big 12 – or any league – is evaluated nationally. But the fact that the Big 12 has been the attendance champ for the last 11 years _ drawing over 1 million fans each of the past five seasons  _ is another major hallmark of the league.

Having covered the Big 12 since its beginning, what stands out most to me is how every team of the original dozen, save Missouri, had what I call a rubber-meets-the-road period during its time in the Big 12. By that, I mean when the school’s success in women’s basketball gained traction and spread out beyond the traditional, committed fan base and resonated with alums and the surrounding community.

For some schools  _ Iowa State, Baylor, Oklahoma, Texas A&M and Kansas State among them – this period really did “stick” and significantly changed the program.

When the league began, Colorado – which saw a Final Four berth slip away in the waning minutes of a regional final in 1995 – was a stronger program attendance-wise then than it is now, but that carried through for the early years of the Big 12. The Buffs, now in the Pac-12, are still trying to gain that back, and are doing so under a head coach, Linda Lappe, who played for Colorado in the Big 12.

Kansas went a dozen years (2000-2012) between NCAA tournament bids, which no one would have expected when the Big 12 began with the Jayhawks as the first regular-season champ in 1997. But the Jayhawks did capture the hearts of their men’s-hoops crazy campus when they sold-out Allen Fieldhouse for the WNIT final in 2009, and they’ve made an unexpected and possibly program-rejuvenating NCAA Sweet 16 run this season.

Only Mizzou, which is headed to the SEC next season, never really had a breakthrough that truly changed the program’s perception. This despite the fact that the Tigers had a huge NCAA tournament upset – as a No. 10 seed, they beat No. 2 Georgia on the Bulldogs’ home court – to make the 2001 Sweet 16. By the time the 2001-02 season began the following fall, whatever buzz there had been was extinguished. Perhaps the moment when spark turns into flame will come for the Tigers in the SEC.

One of the most gratifying women’s sports history moments I’ve witnessed was the 2002 NCAA regional final in Boise, Idaho, when Oklahoma beat its longtime Big Eight mate Colorado to give the Big 12 its first Women’s Final Four team. Just 12 years earlier, Oklahoma had killed its women’s basketball program for a little over a week, convinced it would be a perpetual underachiever that no one would ever want to watch.

A national outcry from coaches, administrators and fans quickly caused OU to reverse course. But once the program was saved, it still need a true savior. That person took over six years after the resurrection: Oklahoma native Sherri Coale, who went from coaching Norman High School to running the Sooners in 1996. Her enormous success has made that brief banishment of the OU program look even more wrong-headed and medieval in retrospect.

That 2002 OU team included a starter named Caton Hill; she would go on to be an Army flight surgeon who served in the Middle East. Captain Hill is one of the many players who has given Big 12 women’s basketball its personality, the type of competitors whom I call “memory-makers.”

That’s been critically important in the growth of the women’s basketball: To have those individual standouts to whom fans become attached and don’t forget. They provide a benchmark for future players to reach and exceed.

It’s so important a factor in spectator sports to have historical context, to be able to say, “You know who she reminds me of? Remember that player at Iowa State?”

That is how a sport becomes part of its peoples’ lifestyles, when it imbeds in their minds and matters to them through both their team’s thick and thin years.

Players such as Iowa State’s Angie Welle, a 6-foot-4 center who used speed – plus a move to the basket that became known as the “Welle Waltz.” Texas Tech’s Rene Hanebutt and her “bunny-hop” 3-point shot. Phylesha Whaley’s undersized magic inside for Oklahoma.

Nicole Ohlde’s nimble feet around the basket, and her K-State teammates Kendra Wecker pulling up for the sweet jumper and Laurie Koehn hitting different-area-code 3-pointers.

Kansas’ Lynn Pride playing at or sometimes above the rim. Texas’ Jamie Carey spotting up from behind the arc. Baylor’s Sophia Young using moves that almost looked like ballet in the paint. Oklahoma’s Courtney Paris setting a ridiculous standard for double-doubles. Oklahoma State’s tiny but mighty Andrea Riley launching shots from all over the court and becoming the Big 12’s leading scorer to the delight of coach Kurt Budke, who died in a November plane crash along with assistant Miranda Serna.

Texas A&M’s Danielle Adams proving unstoppable in the 2011 national championship game. Nebraska’s Kelsey Griffin leading the Huskers on a long unbeaten ride. Missouri’s Evan Unrau learning to shoot left-handed in season after breaking a finger on her natural shooting (right) hand. Colorado’s Jackie McFarland being the second of three sisters all to play basketball in the Big 12.

Four of the original members of the Big 12 are gone (Nebraska, Colorado) or soon to leave (Texas A&M, Missouri). TCU and West Virginia are set to join the league for 2012-13, a new set of  “brothers and sisters.”

They’ll encounter a Baylor program that brings back all five starters from its NCAA title team, including “memory-makers” such as Brittney Griner and Odyssey Sims.

And they’ll find a conference that all these years later has been very, very good for women’s basketball, even if initially that wasn’t on the minds of the power brokers that created the league.

With Karen Aston and Texas, though, there is no doubt that today really is a dream come true: She is, after more than two decades in the profession, the head coach at the place she wants to be more than anywhere.

Aston was officially announced as boss of the Longhorns on Tuesday, the same day that another Big 12 school, Baylor, is playing for a national championship here in the Mile High City.

Was the timing was coincidental or on purpose? Whatever the case, the contrast is striking. Baylor, the program that once was at the bottom of the old Southwest Conference that was ruled by Texas, has been atop the women’s hoops world this season. Texas struggled through a disappointing year marred by injuries and talk of coach Gail Goestenkors’ future.

It was five years ago today – April 3, 2007 – that Goestenkors informed Duke’s administration that she was leaving the Blue Devils to take over at Texas. That was a job Aston had hoped to get then. She had spent the 2006-07 season as associate head coach at Baylor after being on the Texas staff the previous eight years, but you could say that her eye was on Texas for long, long time.

But Texas’ thought process in 2007 when longtime coach Jody Conradt retired was to go get the most successful head coach in the country that the Longhorns thought they could lure away. Goestenkors, with four Final Four appearances at Duke, fit that description.

We know now that it didn’t work out, and the success of Baylor and last year’s NCAA champion, Texas A&M, is part of the reason why. Next to what Baylor and A&M were doing, Texas’ inability to get past the second round of the NCAA tournament under Goestenkors didn’t cut it with Longhorns fans. Much of this season, she looked pretty miserable, and made – I think – the right move personally and professionally by stepping down on March 26.

So now the Texas went a different direction than the school did in going after Goestenkors. Aston isn’t the “name” that Goestenkors was, but everyone who’s really into women’s basketball knows her.

Aston took the old-school path to this peak. An Arkansas native, she started as a high school coach in the late 1980s after finishing her college playing career at Arkansas-Little Rock.

Her success in the prep ranks led to an assistant’s job at Baylor working for Sonja Hogg in 1994. Aston then spent 13 years in the assistants’ ranks_  all in the Lone Star State at Baylor, North Texas and Texas.

Then she took the step up to had coach. After four years in Charlotte and this past season in North Texas, Aston is finally at the summit she seemed to always want to reach. And in some ways, her work begins anew.

Baylor will bring all five of its starters back for next season. TCU comes into the Big 12, which will raise that school’s profile and should bolster its recruiting. While Texas A&M leaves for the SEC and won’t be a direct competitor on the court for Texas in Big 12 play, Gary Blair will still be just as large a recruiting presence in the state.

Aston’s biggest advantage over Goestenkors is location, location, location. Aston has spent so much time living in and recruiting in Texas that she hits the ground running in a way that Goestenkors really could not have done.

It seems to me that Aston deserves this chance. She has the contacts and the relationships already built in the state. Now, let’s see what she can do with the job that’s long been on her mind.

Opposing coaches watch film, do the scout, and run their players through practice before facing UConn, just like going against any other team. Except it’s not. You wonder how many coaches – for instance, one of a program that had lost its last 27 in a row to the Huskies – could truly keep 100 percent faith that this preparation really mattered.

Yet that’s what being a coach is: Believing you always prepare to win because that possibility always exists. Even if you are about the only one on Earth who believes it.

Now look at this score: St. John’s 57, No. 2 UConn 56. Coach Kim Barnes Arico and her Red Storm players may wake up Sunday and initially think they just had a very pleasant dream, kind of like those where you possess an inexplicable but astonishing ability to fly.

However, it really did happen Saturday. And even more astounding, it happened in Storrs, Conn., at Gampel Pavilion. The last time an unranked foe walked out of that building with a victory over UConn’s women was St. Patrick’s Day, 1993.

The No. 1 movie at the box office then was “Groundhog Day,” a film that sums up what it soon would become like for most teams to play UConn. They’d repeat the same experience over and over and over and over against the Huskies. At home, on the road, at a neutral site, UConn would win. Year after year.

That last unranked opponent to win at Gampel was Louisville, in the first round of the NCAA tournament. A lot of teams, in fact, beat UConn that season: 10, with Miami doing it twice. The Huskies were 18-11 in 1992-93, the last season that UConn wasn’t a powerhouse.

The Huskies subsequently have won seven NCAA titles, and the closest thing they’ve had to a “bad” year was 2004-05, when they went 25-8. They still won the Big East tournament and advanced to the NCAA’s Sweet 16 then.

A strong case can be made that every year since 1993, UConn either won the NCAA title or had at least a good chance to do so. Even in the Sweet 16 seasons of 1999 (when they lost then-freshman guard Sue Bird to an ACL in December ‘98) and 2005 (when they were adjusting after Diana Taurasi graduated).

The most amazing thing about Geno Auriemma’s program has been that the Huskies have so consistently shown up at full force for so many years no matter the opponent. Through many different teams with different dominant personalities, UConn has maintained the “you snooze, you lose” mentality, even against opponents the Huskies really could have beaten in their sleep.

St. John’s wasn’t one of those, though. The Red Storm now is 18-8 overall and 10-3 in the Big East. The weirdest loss for St. John’s this season was 63-56 at Harvard on Dec. 22. It was especially perplexing considering that on Dec. 11, St. John’s actually had made Baylor sweat a bit in what ended up being a 73-59 Bears’ victory.

St. John’s has come back from the loss to Harvard, though, to win 11 of its next 13, with the only losses to Marquette and Notre Dame.

The Irish, meanwhile, had been knocked off last Sunday by West Virginia, as the past month or so has been a time of “You’ve got to be kidding,” upsets.

Crazy stuff, like Maryland losing at home to Virginia Tech on Jan. 26.  Or Kentucky, while on top of the SEC, losing to the league’s last-place team, Alabama, on Thursday for the Wildcats’ third defeat in a row.

But UConn losing at home to an unranked team? There are unexpected upsets … and then there’s just daydreaming. It must have seemed like the latter for any St. John’s fan. The Red Storm had lost 27 in a row to UConn; their last victory over the Huskies was in the aforementioned 1993 season, on Jan. 6 in New York.

It’s not like anything is needed to get across the point of how distant that is, save simple math: 19 years – as long or longer than today’s college freshmen have been alive.

Yet consider these hoops facts from back then to reiterate how far in the past we’re going to get to the most recent time before Saturday that St. John’s got to celebrate after meeting UConn. In 1993:

*- Sheryl Swoopes was a college senior who would take Texas Tech all the way to an NCAA title.

*-Texas Tech’s national-semifinal victory over Vanderbilt on April 3 wasn’t seen in its entirety by local television viewers in the Women’s Final Four city of Atlanta. The event was carried by CBS then in a Saturday-Sunday format, and Atlanta’s CBS affiliate had a Saturday afternoon news show it didn’t want to pre-empt for the Vandy-Tech game.

*-An Ohio State freshman named Katie Smith would have been the star of the NCAA championship game … if Swoopes hadn’t been there.

*-UConn was led by Rebecca Lobo, a talented sophomore still coming into her own.

*-Gail Goestenkors was in her first season as a head coach, with Duke going 12-15.

*-Kim Mulkey was seven years away from becoming a head coach.

In regard to the latter, Mulkey’s Baylor team cut it a little too close for comfort against Texas Tech on Saturday, almost giving us the insanity of the Nos. 1 and 2 teams losing on the same night.

But Baylor held off Tech, the only Big 12 team that has given the Bears any real trouble this season. Baylor won by eight points at Tech on Jan. 18; a month later, on Saturday, it was a five-point Bears’ victory.

A lot of emotion – some of it not very positive -  has surrounded the Tech-Baylor game the last couple of years, going back to the Brittney Griner/Jordan Barncastle incident in 2010. We won’t rehash it here, except to say that even though this was a home contest for Baylor, there was some concernt that it could be a “danger” game for the Bears.

But who thought UConn would be in any real danger at home against St. John’s on Saturday? Just maybe Auriemma did. Last Monday after UConn’s 73-55 victory at Oklahoma, Auriemma talked about how his group had looked “mortal,” and said that was all part of a national puzzle that indicated parity in at least some form.

“I like to think that the game is getting more parity every year, although it’s hard to see. It’s like global warming.  [People say] ‘There’s global warming out there.’

‘Really? I don’t see it.’

‘Well, it’s there, trust me.’

“That’s kind of where we are right now.”

Like most things, that’s been a process. When St. John’s hired Barnes Arico as head coach in May 2002, most fans nationally didn’t even notice. St. John’s essentially was a non-entity in the sport, having gone to the NCAA tournament just three times, all in the 1980s.

Barnes Arico wasn’t trying to restore a culture at St. John’s, she was trying to build one. In 2010, the Red Storm knocked hard on the door of the NCAA Sweet 16, but fell to Florida State 66-65 in overtime.  Last year, they lost in the second round again, this time to Stanford.

Young players _ such as Da’Shena Stevens, Shenneika Smith, Eugeneia McPherson and Nadira McKenith _ have become veterans now.

Saturday, it was Smith’s 3-pointer with 8 seconds left, off a pass from McKenith, that sealed the victory and gave the Red Storm a chance to celebrate something none of them had experienced before. And a win over UConn is a very nice plum to have in your “body of work” for the selection committee’s review.

Will this loss hurt UConn? That’s unlikely. It will give Huskies fans something different to full-bore obsess over – gee, maybe the team does miss Maya Moore just a little, huh?  _  and it will irritate the players, who want no part of losing anywhere, but especially not at home.

Saturday again proved, though, it really can happen to anybody.

But even if there had been a wait instead of your choice of tables, Wendy Larry wouldn’t have minded. For the first time in her adult life, she can casually spend time chatting on a weekday during basketball season. There is no practice to prepare, or meeting to run, or luncheon to speak at, or film to watch.

In May, she resigned after 24 seasons and 559-203 record as head coach at Old Dominion. A contract dispute with athletic director Wood Selig – Larry was entering her final year, and Selig wouldn’t give her an extension – was unpleasantly played out publicly.

Long the primary face of ODU’s athletic success, Larry opted to resign rather than muddle through what she felt would be a perfunctory season before being let go. She is getting her last year of salary, but she no longer has a real role in the athletic department, and her ties to ODU are severed. At least for now.

Maybe the wound will be repaired with time. Or maybe it won’t. She wasn’t planning to leave and never imagined ODU’s 72-55 CAA tournament quarterfinal loss to Delaware would be her last on the sidelines of her alma mater.

I went to the Tidewater area recently as part of ESPNW’s “Hoops Across America” project, and wrote about the past, present and future at Old Dominion. But there was more to say specifically about Larry and how her situation reflects where women’s basketball is now.

Does she miss coaching? Yes, and she watches women’s and men’s games frequently on television now, calling it a “re-education” process. As a bystander without a rooting interest, she can see the sport again from a purely analytical standpoint. It’s been somewhat of a revelation.

So has the time she spent this summer with her mother, who went through bouts of illness. She feels they got to know each other again, after so many years when Larry’s summers were crammed with recruiting trips and basketball camps, as the supposed “off-season” did not really allow much of a break in the daily demands of a coach.

Larry resents how her departure happened … yet acknowledges the good to come from it, especially the days with her mom. It presents an intriguing question: Could it be this really all was for the best?

Larry stares out at the sparkling water, and listens to it as well.

“See that? Hear that?” she says, smiling, about the sight and sound of the waves of Lynnhaven Inlet. “That’s what sustains me. I love it. I’m loving life right now.”

***

Larry grew up not that far from the water in New Jersey; her grandparents had boats. She remembers driving to the Tidewater area in 1972 as a junior in high school. She was visiting William and Mary in Williamsburg, and had her heart set on going to college there. But she’d been talked into continuing further down pine-tree-lined Interstate 64, through the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel into Norfolk, to see Old Dominion, too.

She walked into ODU Fieldhouse, which has now been remodeled into a student-rec center. Even in its former incarnation, it likely wouldn’t have impressed today’s recruits.

But to a teen-aged girls’ basketball player in the early 1970s, the Fieldhouse was palatial. Larry felt the first tug for going to ODU instead. But … her favored choice remained William and Mary.

“They didn’t let me in on early acceptance,” Larry said, laughing in retrospect at what was actually good fortune. “So the pendulum swung to Old Dominion.”

After playing at ODU, Larry went into coaching. She became an assistant at her alma mater for Marianne Stanley, who’d been a championship player at Immaculata. After ODU won the NCAA title over Georgia in 1985, Larry interviewed for two jobs.

“Tara VanDerveer got Stanford,” Larry said, “and I got Arizona.”

She liked the Wildcats’ potential and the school’s commitment then, but Tucson just wasn’t the right place for her.  “All beach and no ocean,” Larry said.

When Stanley left ODU after the 1986-87 season, Larry had the chance to come home. She took over the ODU program and made the NCAA tournament her first three seasons while the school was still in the Sun Belt Conference.

After a 5-21 record in 1990-91, ODU’s incredible run in the Colonial Athletic Association began. For the next 17 seasons – from 1992-2008 – ODU won the league tournament and NCAA automatic bid.

Most of those years, ODU was the best team in the league. But not always. Yet every year for nearly two decades, when it mattered most in league play, ODU won. The CAA has changed over the years, including its member institutions. Part of what ended Larry’s career at ODU was that other schools got better at women’s basketball and kept her team away from the automatic bid the last three years.

“I’d like to think we had something to do with that,” Larry said of ODU’s influence on the CAA’s overall improvement. “We asked the coaches to beef up their schedules.”

The closest Larry got to the pinnacle as a head coach was in 1997, after ODU beat Stanford in the national semifinals before falling to Tennessee. That ’97 overtime duel between ODU and Stanford, which felt and played out more like a national-championship game than the actual final did, remains one of the most emotional, dynamic women’s basketball games in Final Four history.

From Ticha Penicheiro’s initial driving layup to the Cardinal’s frantic misses in overtime, it had a “historic” feeling to it even as we were watching it.

Larry can take the time to think about such memories now. She also recalls a 2002 Sweet 16 blitzing of Kansas State, when it was almost as if ODU had hit the Wildcats with a stun gun. The score was 88-62, but the game wasn’t nearly that close.

Larry grins and shakes her head at how well ODU played that day, but adds that in spite of that, “I knew in the next game we just had no chance. I couldn’t say that, but I knew it.”

That’s because ODU next faced the Sue Bird/Diana Taurasi/Swim Cash-led UConn team that finished with a perfect record. In Larry’s last trip to the NCAA tournament, in 2008, ODU got “UConn-ed” again, this time by the likes of Maya Moore and Tina Charles in the Sweet 16.

Larry had some real standouts in her time at ODU, such as Penicheiro, Celeste Hill, Clarisse Machanguana, Mery Andrade, Nyree Roberts and Hamchetou Maiga. But Larry also had a lot of roll-up-their sleeves workhorses: the less-talented players who had big hearts and scraped knees.

She wonders what it would be like to coach “the cream” of women’s basketball talent, so the WNBA intrigues her. She says she could adjust to being an assistant at the college level or in the pros.

Larry feels like she’s not done with coaching, yet at the same time, there is no hurry to move on to something else. For that matter, the Atlantic Ocean, the Chesapeake Bay and Hampton Roads are magnetizing forces for her. She won’t go just anywhere.

“I see myself still looking at water,” she said.

***

Larry has a foot in the pioneering past of women’s college basketball, when salaries were low, perks were few, and times were tougher yet simpler. Isn’t retrospect usually like that?

When you were struggling, you didn’t always notice what was fun about it. Yet for most folks, the best stories tend to come from those early days of their careers when budgets were tight and they had to come up with creative solutions for problems because there wasn’t money to fix them.

Driving the vans, washing the uniforms, and packing homemade lunches maybe didn’t seem so great at the time. Looking back, though, coaches remember how they helped each other despite rivalries.

“I got a story,” Larry says, grinning. This one is about Kay Yow, who in the early 1980s was recruiting and came across an upset Larry in an airport. During a layover in Atlanta, Larry’s wallet , with ID and credit cards, had been stolen. Now she was trying to rent a car to take care of her priority – seeing the recruits – but had no way to do it.

Yow, ever helpful, gave Larry her own ID and credit card to go get a car, saying she could just pay her back later. Skeptical but in desperation, Larry gave it a try.

“So the woman behind the counter takes the license,” Larry said. “And she says, ‘Sandra? … Sandra?’ I’m like, ‘Who is she talking to?’ Then she says, ‘Ms. Yow?’

“I said, ‘Uh, yes?’ And she said, ‘Today is a special day for you, isn’t it?’ And I’m, like, busted. I don’t know what she’s talking about. She said, ‘You look mighty good for 40.’ I was 26 at the time.”

Busted indeed.

“Not only did I not know my own first name – I mean, how many people knew Kay’s first name was really Sandra? – I also didn’t know it was my 40^th birthday,” Larry said.

They then explained the whole thing … and Larry actually still got the car, along with an admonition not to try this stunt again.

“I was so into the history of the game,” Larry said. “And I was fortunate that at a young age, I was part of the history. I have a great fear that we have a tendency not to spend enough time on it. You have to know where you were before you know where you gotta go. You have to understand what it takes to get there.”

Larry tells some more funny tales, just the tip of the iceberg of all she knows. It’s a pleasant afternoon, not maudlin or overly sentimental. She’s doing fine. But exactly how her life will look in another year or two is not something she’s figured out just yet.

***

Women’s basketball isn’t like the men’s game in terms of pressure to succeed leading to job termination. But it’s progressed in that direction, which seems natural considering the increase in salaries at the Division I level, especially in the past decade.

We in the media talk about this periodically: Are the coaching salaries too high across the board, artificially inflated by the success of a handful of the best coaches? Should programs spend so much on salaries for coaches whose programs, in general, don’t make a profit for the university? Have higher coaching salaries demonstrably improved the overall quality of the women’s college game?

But even if you do think women’s hoops coaches are paid too much, how do you put that genie back in the bottle? That’s a whole other column – or several – but it’s part of the general discussion of what happened last year at ODU.

Especially depending on your age, you may be able to relate to all sides of this. You may feel badly for Larry or any coach who gives a program its identity and isn’t ready to leave. But you can also see the point of view of administrators who are juggling many constituencies and might want their own choices in coaching positions.

Coaches may think, “I was doing this job when my AD was still just a goofball in junior high. Now he can get rid of me?”

ADs may think, “I’ve got a whole lot of people to try to make happy, Coach, and you’re not at the top of the list.”

Even if you appreciate how much coaches such as Larry have contributed to the sport, you still may wonder if a fresh approach was needed.

Sometimes people get tired in their jobs without even realizing it. Or maybe others get tired of them. Exits aren’t always graceful or pleasant. And there are financial realities for some institutions in regard to coaching salaries. ODU did not pay top dollar for Karen Barefoot to replace Larry.

As a longtime coach, your only remedy against being replaced is to keep producing _ although sometimes even that isn’t enough.

“It’s a young person’s world,” says ODU alum Nancy Lieberman. She actually tends to be pragmatically correct about a lot in athletics, and her statement is generally true. But then you remember that 65-year-old Gary Blair won his first NCAA title with Texas A&M last season.

Of course, Blair was also practically kicked to the curb in 2003 by Arkansas, which wanted to go a different direction. It wasn’t easy for him to relocate to College Station, Texas, considering his family members’ work and school commitments that remained in Fayetteville, Ark. But he went, and he’s had the last laugh.

There were fans and observers who thought ODU needed new blood. Now that the Monarchs have that, we’ll wait to see what it actually produces.

***

It’s been interesting looking just at the Big 12 in women’s hoops and how some coaching “legend” departures and replacement hires have gone in the last decade.

Texas Tech’s Marsha Sharp, Colorado’s Ceal Barry and Texas’ Jody Conradt all orchestrated their own exits for the most part, stayed tied to their schools, and seem relatively content in their current lives.

Kansas’ Marian Washington was both physically ill and feeling pressured to leave when she departed the Jayhawks during the 2003-04 season. As far as I can tell, she has little relationship with the school or the program she dedicated so much of her career to.

Was it the right time for each coach to go? All were in a little different circumstances, but one could say, with respect, that it probably was. Yet that didn’t necessarily mean the programs improved without them.

Kansas’ last NCAA appearance was 2000. The Jayhawks didn’t make the field in Washington’s last four seasons and still haven’t done it yet under Bonnie Henrickson, either. She’s in her eighth season in Lawrence.

Colorado hasn’t made the NCAA tournament since 2004, Barry’s second-to-last year as coach. Kathy McConnell-Miller didn’t get an NCAA bid in her five seasons in Boulder. Linda Lappe, one of Barry’s former players who’s in her second year guiding CU, is off to a strong start with the Buffs in their first season in the Pac-12.

Kristy Curry ended Texas Tech’s five-year NCAA drought – that’s a long time in Lubbock – last season, her fifth with the program. Gail Goestenkors came to Texas a year after Curry went to Tech, and the joke was the Longhorns sent a Brinks truck to Duke to pick her up.

Texas has made the NCAA tournament all four of her seasons in Austin. But sky-high expectations, fueled by her salary, were for Final Four appearances pronto, not an NCAA second-round loss followed by three consecutive first-round losses.

The difficulties of playing in the Big 12 – which has had national champions in Baylor and Texas A&M, plus two Final Four appearances from Oklahoma in the past seven years – help explain why the replacements at Kansas, Colorado, Texas Tech and Texas haven’t had as much success as they all hoped they would.

But it also shows that replacing a longtime coach can be an even bigger challenge than most initially think.

Barefoot is facing that now at Old Dominion. She’s 39, and feels she’s paid her dues, going back to her days as a Division III player. She knows there are many hurdles, but she envisions herself eventually clearing all of them.

This has not been like a relay race, though. Larry feels the baton was taken from her. Someone else handed it to Barefoot.

So Larry currently has things on her mind other than ODU basketball. For the first time, she didn’t winterize her boat. Normally she’s had to because she knew she wouldn’t be using it for months during the season. She expects to be catching some striped bass soon.

It’s Friday, and some friends will be over at her house that night to try a new recipe. Larry’s life right now isn’t affected by missed jump shots by a tired freshman or the whims of an indecisive teen-aged recruit.

It might be one day again. But not on this sunny afternoon.

“It’s in my soul, it’s who I am,” Larry said about coaching. “It’s my identity. It’s what I love to be.”

I was a senior at the University of Missouri then, a few months from graduation and what I hoped was a future covering sports for a newspaper. But I already was well aware that what I wanted most to cover – women’s basketball – was not valued by the majority of people who ran newspaper sports departments.

One of my journalism instructors, then the sports editor at the Columbia Missourian, said I shouldn’t cover women’s basketball because I was “too into it.” Of course, he didn’t say that to my male counterparts about any men’s sports that they were really “into.”

He felt that I knew too much about women’s basketball, and thus would write stories that tried to impart more than rudimentary facts about teams and games. He didn’t believe there were actually readers who wanted to see the sport covered as if it were something more than just an obligation.

The Missouri men had played earlier that very same day in Stillwater, and Gallagher-Iba Arena had nearly emptied out before the women’s game began. A friend/fellow journalism student was there covering the men and had been asked to do a story on the women, too. He didn’t know much about the women’s team _ he didn’t regularly cover them _ nor had he even been able to watch their game as he was busy during that time writing his story and notebook for the men’s game on deadline.

I offered to write _ literally write, with a pen on a yellow legal pad – a story for him on the women while he finished his men’s stuff. Then he could send it in as his own. And so that’s what we did. In retrospect, it wasn’t ethical, but I didn’t care at the time. I was an idealist; I didn’t want the women to get a story that read as if the author hadn’t seen their game.

It was an 830-mile round trip from Columbia, Mo., to Stillwater, and the speed limit then was 55 mph. Believe it or not, I really tried to not break the law. So it was about a 14-hour drive there and back. And on the way home, the rain began to turn icy. I noticed this just about 5 seconds too late. I saw the car in front of me go off the road, and before I could slow way down, I was next.

There wasn’t much time to think as my car began to spin. It happened very quickly, as these things usually do. Then the car was stopped, the engine off, and I was facing the opposite direction I’d been traveling. I was off into the grass next to the road, but …

I hadn’t hit anything. I hadn’t flipped over. I hadn’t damaged the car at all, nor gone too far off the road to be able to get out. I had simply spun like a top. Physically, neither I nor my car was worse for wear.

Emotionally, though, I had issues. I was still a long way from home, and now terrified. At 21, I didn’t have a credit card, nor enough money, to stay in a hotel. I had to keep driving, albeit at a crawl. I made it back to Columbia sometime around dawn _ exhausted, sore from my frightened grip on wheel … and yet strangely exhilarated because I had “survived” the trip.

However, for several months after that, I didn’t drive well in the rain, to say the least. In April of that year, even with the temperature nowhere near freezing, I myself froze up when an average rain began while I was making an hour and half drive to my parents’ house. I had to pull over at a rest stop and just sit for a couple of hours until the rain stopped.

I was genuinely worried that this intense new fear of driving in the rain would become a complicating factor in my life. How was I going to function if I had to stop driving every time it started to rain?

But then through the rest of that year, the memory of the spinning car gradually lost its hold on me. I can’t remember exactly when I stopped having that panicky feeling as soon as I saw a raindrop on the windshield, but the phobia went away.

In the almost 25 years since that first visit to Oklahoma State, I’ve driven hundreds of thousands of miles, at least a fair amount of them in rain. Some in ice. Some in snow. I don’t really think much about that trip; in fact, I can’t recall the last time it had crossed my mind until Monday.

But as I made a sad journey from Kansas City to Stillwater, it came back to me. I thought, “My life could have been over that day in February 1987. That icy spinout could have ended in many worse ways, and instead, it was essentially harmless.”

People can never know all the instances when the fork in the road of fate went in their favor. Or if a time may come when it doesn’t.

***

Monday, for the first time ever, I drove to Oklahoma for something other than a sports event. That’s always what had brought me there before over the last quarter-century _ usually basketball, but also a few times I’d gone for golf or football.

This time, I went to Oklahoma State’s Gallagher-Iba Arena, but not to see hoops. The building looked and felt different, more like a somber cathedral than a gym. The basketball rims were gone for the day, replaced by a stage with a podium, and large photographs of four people who’d spent a good deal of time there.

It seemed unreal to walk into the gym to pay respects and say goodbye. But that’s what everyone was there to do, four days after a small plane crash took the lives of Oklahoma State women’s basketball coaches Kurt Budke and Miranda Serna, plus OSU boosters Olin and Paula Branstetter.

The memorial itself was touching and poignant, with OSU interim coach Jim Littell handling most of the eulogizing in an uplifting and inspirational way. I talked with former players after the service, some of the same kids I’d spoken to after Cowgirls games over the years.

“I still recognize your voice,” 2009 grad Taylor Hardeman said to me, smiling and yet near tears. “That’s kind of funny, isn’t it?”

Meanwhile, another former Cowgirl, Megan Byford, was hard to recognize for any of us journalists who’d last seen her as a senior in 2010. Now a graduate assistant at Pittsburg State in Kansas, she’d lost weight and changed her hairstyle/color.

“This is like a dream,” she said. “A bad dream. None of this even seems real.”

Many hours later, after I’d filed a story on Oklahoma State and watched UConn-Stanford on television, I was ready to go home to Kansas City. I have a credit card now, and I could have stayed in Stillwater. Yet I didn’t want to. I wanted to sleep in my own bed that night, however much I could sleep.

I walked out of the media room and into what was now an empty arena. The sad accessories needed for a memorial service had been put away. It looked ready for hoops again, except the basket stanchions had not been put back in place yet.

I walked toward the scorers’ table, and noticed a book sitting there. It was a Bible, and I wondered who had left it there. I am not a religious person, which is perhaps as big an understatement as I can make. But I accept that, especially in this part of the country, I am a distinct minority. Religion brings those who believe in it comfort in the most dire times, and on this day, especially, many people here desperately had needed some kind of solace. Their faith provided it.

I looked around the gym for several minutes. And if you’ve ever been alone inside an empty arena, you may have noticed this sensation: It’s so quiet, it’s almost loud.

I thought about the way Gallagher-Iba had appeared the first time I’d been there; a blurry vision in my mind of a much smaller place – it has subsequently been expanded – with wooden bleacher seats. I stood behind the chairs on the Oklahoma State bench that had been filled the last six years by Budke and Serna, two people who would never be here again.

In the outer hallway, there were several floral arrangements, and also banners with what had to be thousands of signatures expressing condolences and gratitude. There were far too many to read, so I just scanned them, walking slowly past, and then I found myself reading one aloud.

There was no reason for me to have noticed it; it wasn’t written in large script or set apart. It was just there mixed in with all the others, and I was incredulous, after reading the message and seeing the name, that I had so randomly seen it in needle-in-a-haystack fashion.

The mourner, Suzanne Long, had written her thanks to Miranda Serna for having given her tickets to see her first OSU football game. I recognized the name and Serna’s kind gesture from having read about it that morning in a fine story by my ESPN.com colleague Liz Merrill on how the community of Stillwater was coping with another airplane-crash tragedy. Liz had talked to Long, a friend of Serna’s and the general manager of a Perkins restaurant near OSU’s campus, on Sunday.

It seemed incredibly bizarre to me that of all those signatures I’d just been passing by, not actually reading them, that one had stood out. Does part of your brain actually see things you don’t always realize it does? Or was it just a random coincidence that my eyes fell on that small note that was all but hidden amongst all the others?

***

I was still contemplating that when I finally left Gallagher-Iba some nine hours after I’d entered the building. It was raining _ a chilly November drizzle, but not an icy one.

Nonetheless, it made absolutely no sense at all to drive the nearly five hours home on a stormy night … and yet I did. I didn’t drive very fast. I reflected on the positive ways media coverage of women’s basketball has changed since 1987 – but also the frustrating ways that it hasn’t.

I considered all the hours of my life I’ve spent by myself in a car going to and from basketball games all over the country. I thought about the other people who do this – some of whom never get paid a cent for their effort. Sometimes, I admit, I’ve questioned the sensibility of our devotion, because the people who make decisions about sports coverage still – for the most part – don’t value women’s athletics the way I wish they did.

But would I change what I’ve done, if I could? No. Most of the time, I successfully remind myself that the true value of something is measured internally. And I must admit, I’ve usually cherished the alone time on the road: That feeling of freedom and motion _ as we pampered modern-day travelers channel our ancestors’ “pioneer” spirit _ and wouldn’t want to give it up.

I’ve driven this stretch of Interstate 35 in Kansas/Oklahoma many times. When I’m doing so at night, I have this sensation _ it’s part eerie and part magical _ that the miles of wheat fields on either side of the highway are like the ocean: dark, mysterious and seemingly endless.

At one of the rest-area “islands” along the way, there is a memorial to Knute Rockne, the legendary Notre Dame football coach who was killed when he was a passenger in a plane that crashed into those fields near the microscopic town – if you can really call it a town – of Bazaar, Kan.

Every time I stop at this “island,” I look at the memorial and think about the same thing: Rockne died along with seven others on Trans World Airlines flight 599, which was en route from Kansas City to Los Angeles. The crash happened on March 31, 1931 _ and it’s the 1931 part that always amazes me.

That was just 28 years after the Wright brothers had finally gotten their contraption off the ground for a brief time at Kitty Hawk, N.C. Maybe it doesn’t seem stunning to everyone else that it would take less that three full decades for human beings to go from a glorified glider “flight” to commercial air travel that criss-crossed the country. But I must say, it stuns me.

The crash that killed Rockne spurred several safety advances in aviation: A structural defect with the type of plane he was riding in was discovered because of the accident _ moisture had weakened the glue bonding on a strut that helped stabilize the wings, causing one to fall off _ and those aircraft were taken out of airline service. Also, the organization that was the forerunner of today’s Federal Aviation Administration had to change the way it conducted investigations – no more would they be done “in secret” – and much was publicly learned from the tragedy.

There have been many, many aviation disasters since, of large and small aircraft. Gravity and force still wield their awesome power on people, and it’s certain we humans will never completely master the skies. There will always be some risk.

We will wait to see the actual cause of the accident that killed Budke, Serna and the Branstetters, provided it can be determined. Just as the 2001 crash in Colorado that killed 10 members of the Oklahoma State men’s basketball traveling party resulted in new policies about team travel, this likely will do the same about coaches’ transportation.

This is not to say any mistakes were made, because we don’t know that there were. Accidents do happen, and some are catastrophic, leaving no chance for recovery. Whatever the crash’s cause, though, we do know the reason that Budke and Serna were on that plane: They were recruiting, the lifeblood of college athletics. They died on the job, and their minds  - when they boarded their last flight – no doubt were filled with all the responsibilities, obligations and opportunities in front of them.

On that Thursday afternoon – just a week before Thanksgiving – life ended suddenly for these two coaches. They left behind shattered families, and you can imagine what this holiday season is like for those surviving loved ones. Yet the image that will stick with me of Monday’s memorial service is Budke’s three children trying to be brave. They are young adults not ready – no one ever is, no matter how old – to be without their father.

But the way that Alex and Brett physically supported their weeping mother, Shelley, and how Sara reached over to comfort her grandmother … I thought, “Kurt would be so proud of them.”

As the families try to make their way through their forever-changed lives, the Cowgirls team now is the visible legacy of Budke and Serna. All the work they put into this program lives on after them, and that at times may seem a burden to the players. Hopefully, though, the Cowgirls will view it as a solemn honor.

Saturday, they took the court again for their first game since the accident, winning 59-35 over Coppin State. It’s just the start of the next chapter – one that no one ever wanted to write.

But that’s the road that the Cowgirls and the loved ones of the crash victims are on now.

None of us can ever be sure when we might spin off our various roads, or what may happen to us if we do. Somehow, though, we just keep driving.

It reminded me of a story I wrote about the late Wolfpack coach Kay Yow in 2003, before she went into the Naismith Hall of Fame. It ended with a recounting of a conversation I’d had with Page in the mid-1990s about about Yow’s influence:

From ESPN.com, September 2003:

Ever had laryngitis? Not froggy throat, or hoarseness or cough-every-time-you-talk. Flat-out laryngitis, where you can open your mouth and try to scream and absolutely no noise comes out.

I had it for one day in May 1984. I didn’t really believe you could completely lose your voice _ I thought it only happened on sitcoms, like suddenly being allergic to your brother _ until I woke up, back home for the summer from college, and couldn’t even begin the usual monologue over breakfast/newspaper: “Oh, God, I bet Mondale’s not even going to win Minnesota ….”  No words. Nothing.

So years later, I was empathizing while watching Kay Yow coach her North Carolina State team while having laryngitis. She gestured and paced, her eyes got big, her hands clenched. She had a dry-erase board, and she’d scribble messages for her assistants.  She was pretty quiet in the post-game interview, too. Har-har-har.

“Coach, what did you think of Chasity Melvin’s performance tonight?” was the question. And Yow would nod vigorously. One of her assistants, if memory serves, provided the sound, saying, “Well, Coach Yow thinks Chasity played very well tonight …”

Truth is, though, I’ve never heard Yow actually scream even when she did have her voice. Yell just a little to be heard over the din of a game, maybe. But scream? I’m not saying it’s never happened, it’s just hard to picture.   Yow, with that soft North Carolina lilt, doesn’t have a coach’s voice. She has a “Did you want to check out this book for two weeks?” voice.

And yet she is the consummate coach. Her record, combining her days at Elon and North Carolina State, is 625-268. She will go into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame this week, along with Larry Brown, Lute Olson, Magic Johnson, the late Drazen Petrovic and the Harlem Globetrotters team.  Yet you won’t find a person so successful who makes less of a fuss about herself.  She has overcome breast cancer. She has overcome all the changes in her sport that have ended the coaching careers of many of her fellow “pioneers.”

She’s about as square as Sponge Bob, but she still finds ways to relate to kids who listen to music that hurts her ears.  Some people knock over barriers with their bulldozer personalities, and good for them. They’re needed. But others, like Yow, do it another way. They’re persistent at chipping the mortar and the blocks that heed progress; even when you think they should be tired, they somehow aren’t.

Yow so often looks serious that you might not know she has a sense of humor, albeit a gentle one. She has been friend and teacher and coach to so many young women.

A favorite Yow story? One of her many stars, Linda Page, once told me about running into Yow by chance in Philadelphia outside a department store in the mid-1990s. Page lived in Philly; Yow was visiting someone in town.  Page had scored 2,307 points in her career at N.C. State, from 1982-85. Her college days seemed far in her past, though.

And yet seeing her former coach brought back a rush of everything good that had happened to Page during those four years in Raleigh _ and how much it had shaped the person she now was.

So they stood talking and laughing and remembering, and Page thought how lucky it was that they’d happened to be in the same place at the same time for another day.  Then Page realized that Yow _ and all she taught _ had, in fact, been with her all along.

The big headline on the paper in the Salina Journal rack was about how it had been a record-breaking 111 degrees the day before in this central Kansas town. The banner teasing to the sports section, though, caught my eye just as much. It was a photo from the Women’s World Cup after the victory over Brazil.

My parallel sports universe had intersected, at least for a while, with the standard sports universe. This happens sometimes. The WWC became a hot story nationwide with the Rapinoe-to-Wambach connection Sunday in Germany.

It was a last-gasp goal that struck me as sort of the athletic equivalent to the time my sister’s dog dug under the fence and ran away. We’d driven all over our little town looking for and asking neighbors about her, with no luck. She had been gone a full week, and the sad reality was setting in for me: We’d never see her again.

But then at 3 a.m. the next morning, my sister and parents and I all woke up and ran to the door when we heard the barking outside. There she was, standing at the front porch, wagging her tail as if to say, “Hey, it’s just me, back from my excursion.”

I had given up. But the dog hadn’t known that, nor did it matter to her. She completed her journey to get back home.

The U.S. soccer team couldn’t have been that blissfully unaware of potential failure of mission, of course. And yet despite the voice of panic that had to have been playing in their heads _ “We’re going to be eliminated from the World Cup!” _ the Americans continued to attempt to execute in order to score.

What they did was exactly described by the hackneyed cliche that actually, when lived out on a big stage in real time, doesn’t feel cliche at all: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

I was sitting in the media room at the U.S. Women’s Open in Colorado Springs watching the match on television. I felt pretty impartial. I admit when Brazil’s Erika briefly re-enacted the death scene from “Camille,” I had snarkily proclaimed to a fellow reporter that it couldn’t be a Brazilian soccer match unless at least two of them had been carried off on a stretcher.

“Now watch for the miraculous recovery,” I said, and no sooner were the words out of my mouth than Erika was on her feet again, and I had to laugh. Brazil had been through a lot of disappointment in the WWC and Olympics over the years, coming close but never quite being able to win it all. (Not unlike Duke women’s basketball, in fact.) Truth be told, I really didn’t want to watch Brazil get a knife in the heart again, regardless of their histrionics.

In fact, I already was thinking ahead to whether Brazil could win the World Cup, and what that would mean for the women’s game in that soccer-mad nation. But I also felt regret that with the Americans out, viewers in this country wouldn’t pay much attention to the rest of what had been a really interesting event.

And then, bam, Megan Rapinoe’s pass found Abby Wambach’s head, and vice versa. The ball hit the back of the net. Yells went up from all corners of the media room. I was too stunned to yell. I thought, “Did I really see that right? Did it actually happen?”

***

Seven years ago, Wambach had secured the Olympic gold with a header in overtime against Brazil in the Athens Games. Later that fall, she’d come to Kansas City with the national team, and I wanted to talk to her about a few things other than soccer. I wrote then:

Wambach’s hometown is Rochester, N.Y., a city at the heart of both the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements in the 1800s that radically redefined American history. It was also the longtime home of Susan B. Anthony, another woman tireless in traveling for a cause.

Wambach is well aware of the history of her hometown, and it had its impact on her from childhood.

“That’s where it all started to seep in,” Wambach said. “And from being the baby of seven kids, as well. When you’re the youngest, you don’t have much choice in a lot of things. I think that shaped my life in realizing the importance of having choices.”

In the Athens Games’ final in August, Wambach scored the winning goal in overtime vs. Brazil, giving the United States the gold medal. She says it changed her life, but there was something else just as memorable for her from the Olympics.

She and her teammates were inspired by the sight of women from some Muslim countries finally being able to have the “choice” to compete as Olympic athletes.

“It didn’t matter how they finished. You just wanted to say, ‘My God, congratulations,’ ” Wambach said. “You could see on their faces how happy they were to be there, how uplifting it was. There’s nothing like that. As women, we should all still have that feeling. I find it so hard to believe that over time, that appreciation for how far women have come can be lost. Maybe the ability to forget, though, creates a sense of security.”

That was a remarkable insight from a then-24-year-old about the dichotomy of women’s struggle to attain anything. On one hand, it seems we should always be aware of how many barriers have been scaled and toppled. But on the other hand, should women always carry the baggage of thinking about when they weren’t allowed to do something? Isn’t it actually a great sign of progress if the girl born in 2000 completely takes for granted things that the girl born in 1900 never even imagined?

Now Wambach is 31, and this is possibly her last World Cup. She’d missed the 2008 Olympics with a broken leg. She seemed to me the kind of athlete/personality who was meant to get at least one really big moment _ when not just the standard sports universe but the American public at large recognized her as the folk-hero type that she is. Sunday, that happened.

A similar thing took place 12 years ago, too. On June 10, 1999, only soccer fans knew who Brandi Chastain was. On July 10, everybody in America knew her name. That was the most impacting intersection of the sports universes I had witnessed in team sports.

The “Magnificent 7″ U.S. women’s gymnastics squad’s gold in the 1996 Olympics technically was a team event, but not a “team” in the same way that soccer is, of course. The softball, soccer and basketball golds for the U.S. women’s team in those Atlanta Games had also been highly touted. And individual women’s sports’ performances – in figure skating, gymnastics, track and field, tennis, swimming, golf, etc., – had captured the eye of American spectators in my lifetime.

But there had never been that one huge game in a women’s team sport when everybody across the United States was tuning in, (even George Brett’s mom). That July 1999 afternoon in the Rose Bowl was the closest thing to the Super Bowl that a group of women athletes had ever had.

The subsequent pro league, WUSA, wasn’t managed financially as well as it should have been. The enthusiasm for Team USA didn’t translate into great numbers of spectators for a women’s soccer league. Before the 2003 Women’s World Cup, the sport’s stars like Mia Hamm had to go through the painful process of explaining that the league was folding and would try to come back in some form.

Eight years later, Women’s Professional Soccer has six teams and exists only in the parallel sports universe, and even somewhat marginally here. Whether Team USA’s attention-grabbing run to the WWC final boosts the pro league into a higher status in the parallel sports universe (I’m not counting on it really denting the standard sports universe, at least not significantly), remains to be seen.

But at least for a week or so, the universes intersected. Sometimes that’s happened at other events, like the U.S. Women’s Open in 1998, when two 20-year-olds – South Korea’s Se Ri Pak and American amateur Jenny Chuasiriporn – battled in a Monday playoff that went 20 holes.

The intersection of the universes doesn’t mean integration, at least not yet. There was another playoff in this year’s Women’s Open, but the standard sports universe in the United States wasn’t paying attention. It was between two South Korean women who were among the thousands of young girls in that country inspired by Pak. The playoff and So Yeon Ryu’s victory were largely ignored here in the United States … but, of course, there are other “sports universes” in other countries. Rest assured that in Seoul, it was a big deal.

Often, timing is everything in regard to the parallel sports universe really getting into the limelight. Pak and Chuasiriporn had their playoff during the day on a Monday in 1998 when no other live sports were on television. Big as Chastain’s winning penalty kick was 12 years ago, would it have been overshadowed had it happened the following weekend, when John F. Kennedy Jr. was killed in a plane crash?

What about “miracle finish” over Brazil last Sunday? What if Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit and 5-for-5 performance on Saturday had come a day later than it did? Team USA would have had to compete with the Yankee captain for headlines in the standard sports universe. It wouldn’t have been totally overshadowed, but Rapinoe-to-Wambach-to-PKs (starring Hope Solo) would not have been the story of the day.

***

The harsh lessons of WUSA in the aftermath of the 1999 WWC success taught even the biggest women’s sports optimists to temper their expectations about how the standard sports universe really accepts the parallel one. It can burn white-hot and feel like a real embrace, but it’s usually a passing fancy.

How much attention was paid to the actual matches in the 2007 WWC? All the focus from most of American sports media went to the flap involving Solo calling out then-coach Greg Ryan for his bad move of benching her for Briana Scurry against Brazil, and then Solo getting frozen out by her teammates.

Still … the parallel sports universe is always here, and those of us who live in it are daily keeping tabs on its ebbs and flows, its triumphs and dramas, its history-makers and is disappointments.

We accept that those who only visit here periodically rarely know about those things. When they want to put in perspective something epic that happens here and catches their notice, they inevitably compare it to that which they do know: men’s sports. (More on that coming in Part 3.)

But all this isn’t to complain, or chastise them, or rail against the way things are. Instead, it’s a chance to smile knowingly at each other as occupants of the parallel sports universe. We are very familiar with every comparison to the standard sports universe that they make. We know their universe as well as they do.

However, we also know ours. We know Abby Wambach’s history. She didn’t just appear from nowhere for us last Sunday. She won’t disappear for us when the WWC is over. This December, we’ll watch the Women’s College Cup and wonder who among the participants might be future WWC heroes.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what I was doing in Salina, Kan., at midnight on Monday/Tuesday … driving back from Colorado Springs to Kansas City, I stopped off at a speck on the map in the middle of the Sunflower State. I wanted to chat with the parents of the most famous resident of that town for a book I am working on.

As I drove away in the clear moonlight from Claflin, Kan., that evening, I was chuckling to myself thinking of how in the fall of 1996, several of the nation’s best women’s basketball coaches had found their way to this little town. Its largest structures – acting as its mini-skyscrapers – are the grain elevators alongside the railroad track that forms the southern border of the town.

Those coaches visited Claflin in hopes that Jackie Stiles would come pour in points for them. Her parents acknowledged that when she chose Southwest Missouri State, a lot of folks were disappointed. Why not UConn? Why not Georgia? Why not someplace … bigger?

Stiles would break the NCAA Division I scoring record (fellow Kansas Lynette Woodard still holds the overall points mark for D-I women’s college hoops) in her senior season. Stiles also would take SMS (now called Missouri State) to the Women’s Final Four. A devastating series of injuries unfortunately made Stiles a basketball comet, as her pro career didn’t last even two full seasons.

But Stiles had her intersecting period with the standard sports universe that March of 2001. And in the parallel sports universe, she remains as one of the legends.

We safeguard them here. Their feats may be on newspapers headlines everywhere from San Francisco to Salina to Schenectady for a brief time when the sports universes intersect. In this universe, though, we carve their triumphs into stone.