Lady Vols the Champions

The Tennessee Volunteers won the women's college basketball championship, beating Rutgers last night 59 to 46.

That isn't an unusual outcome. It's their seventh national title since Pat Summit has been coaching. Although this is their, and her, first title since 1998, that doesn't really mean the program has been fallow for the last decade -- it's been to the final four during five of those intervening years.

So one of the traditional powerhouses of the game, won a championship. "Big Whoop" you might be tempted to say, if you come from some place outside of Tennessee and if you use corny expressions like "Big Whoop."

The significance for me is that it illustrates what a great year the Marist women had. As I explained in my March 20 entry,
http://cfaille.blogspot.com/2007/03/three-cheers-for-red-fox.html

the women's team from my alma mater not only got into the 64 team tournament this year (itself an unprecedented achievement not only for them but for their whole conference) -- they won the first two rounds against heavily favored team. This means (since its a single-elimination tournament the math isn't too hard) that they were one of only 16 teams still standing when the inexorable brackets matched them against -- Tennessee.

Okay, they lost to Tennessee. The score was 65-46. Look at that sentence again, and look at the score of the final game, at the top of this entry, again. Marist scored as many points against the Lady Vols as Rutgers did in the final game. Both teams lost to the Lady Vols, and both scored exactly 46 points in the process.

So Marist was defeated only by the team that defeated everybody else, and in doing so they did as well against the unbeatable Vols (on the offensive side, anyway) as the team those Vols played in the final. I'm just basking in some reflected glory here.

Oh, by the way. On the men's side of the tournament, the Florida Gators won the title, beating out Ohio State.