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Originally posted by rainmaker
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This seems to me to be true, even at the NCAA National Championship level, don't you think? So here's the part I don't understand. In order to win that last, biggest game, you've got to have such a strong competitive drive that it sort of ruins the fun of just making it, doesn't it? I mean, even though Tennessee lost last night, they're still second in the whole country, with such an unbelieveably successful history. But if that is good enough, they for sure won't win the championship. Yet, if they wind themselves up for that biggest game, and then lose, they are heartbroken. how to strike the balance?
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It's pretty hard to strike the balance. When we first started in travel ball, winning a first round tournament game was tremendous. Finishing with a +.500 record was great (6-4). The second year, we pushed the top team in the league for 4 quarters before losing a tight game in the second round of the tournament, another satisfying outcome.
This year, we could have run the table and won a championship - and we had that as a goal. We entered the season knowing that we had no margin for error, that an undefeated season would be the key to a league championship in all likelihood. And we lost one game, the only game we couldn't afford to lose as it turns out.
So. . . We are happy with how we are playing ball this year, but we are clearly much more disappointed by our losses this year than we were in our first year, even though we lost far fewer games this time around. We were 17-3 in two highly competitive leagues and finished in a tie for the lead in both (and in the one league that offered trophies for first, we lost the tiebreaker
). We made the semifinals of a tournament that we could have won, and lost to a team that we had beaten the last two occasions that we played. That team won the tournament, and they beat a team in the final that has never beaten either of our teams. So we knew the championship was there for us to take, and will never be satisfied with not having finished that job. Boeheim was thinking about '87 while winning this year, and probably still feels bad that those players couldn't be part of the trophy celebration.
I think that you learn and grow from these "almost, not quite" experiences, but you will always have a slight feeling that you left something behind. Is it worth it - I think so. We now walk on a court expecting to win every game, we can go into halftime down a dozen and still expect to win (and have won games in these circumstances). So we have a new confidence in our abilities and have learned how to finish the job on most occasions. But if you reach the top levels, you aren't be completely satisfied if you don't win it all. And that just goes with the territory.
As for smiling (Joe's comment), I think that was easier when the lead was big in each team's favor. It's easy to be loose and happy when you have control. Those players on UCONN and SU stopped smiling when the game tightened up. Syracuse looked tight those last few minutes when the game got too close for comfort. Taurasi wasn't smiling when they called TO and Auriemma chewed her butt for not playing defense (and he quickly saw he needed to sit her a few minutes). Taurasi started smiling again when UCONN began to make plays and open it up again. You couldn't reasonably expect KU to be smiling when they are down 18 in the national final, or Tennessee when they were down 13. That ain't happening.
I do think that one of the big influences in each game was a coach that recognized he had players and he let them play the game. I think that the best players in men's and women's won the championship.