NC State runs out of comebacks, falls to UConn in 2 OT thriller in Huskies’ backyard
There wasn’t much left for Wes Moore to say. His players had left the podium. He sat there alone, facing the reality of the season’s end, voicing his regret over his failure to call a timeout at the end of regulation, his pride in his team not only as players but people.
It took Connecticut two overtimes to eliminate N.C. State, which finally ran out of comebacks Monday night in what may have been the best game of March, any gender, falling one game short of what would have been the Wolfpack’s first Final Four in 24 years.
The N.C. State coach moved to stand up and leave, but not without giving a little bit of a window into what was bugging him above and beyond all else.
“I asked (UConn coach) Geno (Auriemma), we’re supposed to come here next year, I asked, ‘Is this the home game?’” Moore said. “I don’t think he’s going to buy it.”
And that was really the shame of it: N.C. State earned a No. 1 seed and had to play the biggest fan base in the sport 90 miles from campus in a de facto home game. And even in front of a howling UConn home crowd, N.C. State still came back from a double-digit deficit and forced a second overtime on Jakia Brown-Turner’s last-second 3-pointer in a game with 26 lead changes and 18 ties that ended in a 91-87 loss.
When Diamond Johnson ended the third quarter with a step-back 3-pointer and tacked on another early in the fourth to put N.C. State up four, there was a perceptible change in the atmosphere, a tangible sense of unease among the UConn partisans for the first time all evening. Only the small pocket of N.C. State fans were standing then. Everyone – UConn and N.C. State fans alike – knew then this was not going to be settled easily.
“This team has absolutely no quit in us,” N.C. State star Elissa Cunane said. “I think you can see that even if we start off a game bad, not hitting shots or something, we’re not going to give up. I don’t think for a second on that court we gave up or stopped fighting. That’s just something we instill in each other. We know who we are and we know what people we are, and we aren’t going to give up.”
Considering the Wolfpack’s propensity for come-from-behind wins — including Saturday’s stunning pick-pocketing of Notre Dame — being down 10 in the third quarter may not have been the worst scenario for N.C. State, but it certainly isn’t a team that seems to enjoy doing things the easy way.
In the end, N.C. State’s quest to return to the Final Four for the first time since the late Kay Yow was behind the bench fell one step short when the Wolfpack was unable to stop UConn star Paige Bueckers in overtime as she scored 15 of her 27 points in the extra 10 minutes.
There was a last-chance feel to the entire game long before the second overtime. This group has won three ACC titles, gone farther in the NCAA tournament each and every year and moved to the top of the ACC. As three years of progress, success, teamwork and ascending the basketball ladder came to an end, it has carved out its own place in Wolfpack history.
“What a legacy they have now,” Moore said. “Another step would have made it a better legacy. But we definitely got all the effort and heart that you could ask for out of them.”
It’s also full of seniors and super-seniors, including Cunane, Kayla Jones, Raina Perez and Kai Crutchfield — the core of the team. They spent years building toward this moment, having checked every other box on the list, and it all came down to this one night in a very hostile environment.
That environment threatened to make a farce of all of this. What, after all, is the point of battling through the season to secure a No. 1 seed only to put that season on the line against a less accomplished team that backed into the biggest home-crowd advantage in the entire sport? UConn’s logo was on the floor, for God’s sake.
And the NCAA women’s basketball committee may have followed appropriate policies and procedures by putting the Wolfpack in the closest regional to home once South Carolina claimed Greensboro — and N.C. State couldn’t complain about that; the Gamecocks certainly earned it — but UConn earned nothing, and was rewarded anyway.
N.C. State would have been better off being less successful and getting sent to Wichita — like Louisville, which beat Michigan later Monday night to join two other No. 1 seeds and UConn in Minneapolis — than getting sent to a regional that was intended to be a spot for UConn all along, whether the Huskies were a No. 1 seed or not.
The Huskies got hot and healthy at the right time — with superstar Bueckers rounding back into form — and the Wolfpack somehow ended up an underdog in the biggest game of the season. In a game decided, a season ended, by the finest of margins, that surely mattered.
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This story was originally published March 28, 2022 at 9:52 PM with the headline "NC State runs out of comebacks, falls to UConn in 2 OT thriller in Huskies’ backyard."
