BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — It had to happen eventually. It's a shame it had to happen in a road game as the No. 1 seed.
N.C. State finally ran out of comebacks Monday night, although it took not one but two overtimes for Connecticut to eliminate the Wolfpack in what might have been the most dramatic game of the postseason, of any gender.
N.C. State's quest to return to the Final Four for the first time since 1998 ended with a 91-87 loss, a game decided by the finest of margins in front of a howling home crowd only 90 minutes from Connecticut's campus.
The Wolfpack had a couple comebacks in reserve, coming back from 10 down in regulation and forcing a second overtime with a Jakia Brown-Turner 3-pointer with 0.8 seconds to go, but UConn star Paige Bueckers was just too tough, scoring 15 of her 27 points in the final 10 minutes.
The Wolfpack had the ball, with the score tied at 61-61 and 26.6 seconds on the clock in regulation. Three years of progress, success, teamwork and ascending the basketball ladder came to this, one possession to dethrone UConn and take the program back to the Final Four for the first time since the late Kay Yow was behind the bench.
The Wolfpack waited too long, and Diamond Johnson found no space. Kai Crutchfield's hurried 3-pointer at the buzzer was way off, and one of the best games of the tournament would need an extra five minutes to be settled.
And then, after Brown-Turner's corner 3 off a skip pass from Raina Perez as the clock ran down, another five minutes. But the Wolfpack, eventually, ran out of answers.
Brown-Turner had 20 points for N.C. State and Elissa Cunane 18.
The fourth quarter was an end-to-end battle of tough shots and hard drives, with Diamond Johnson leading the way for N.C. State and UConn's star tandem of Bueckers and Azzi Fudd pulling up for jumpers. When Olivia Nelson-Ododa missed two free throws, that left the door open for the Wolfpack with 26.6 seconds to go, but N.C. State couldn't take advantage.
It was a long way from where the second half started. Given the fact that the Wolfpack was having a hard time finding Cunane in the post and couldn't buy a 3-pointer, N.C. State was lucky to be down only six at the half, 34-28. The Wolfpack stayed alive at the free-throw line, making all nine in the first half and getting some tough jump shots from Kayla Jones.
If the defensive game plan was to let Christyn Williams shoot, she wasn't playing along — the UConn guard had 11 points on 12 shots in the first half. But the Huskies seemed a little rattled after Dorka Juhasz appeared to badly injure her left wrist after falling under the basket in the second quarter.
Considering the Wolfpack's propensity for come-from-behind wins — including Saturday's stunning pick-pocketing of Notre Dame — that 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.
At the end of the third quarter, when Diamond Johnson hit a step-back, crossover 3-pointer to pull the Wolfpack within one, 44-43, there was a perceptible change in the atmosphere, a tangible sense of unease among the UConn partisans for the first time all evening.
When Johnson hit another to put N.C. State up four early in the fourth, Geno Auriemma had seen enough and called a timeout to stop the bleeding. 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.
There was a last-chance feel to the entire game long before the final possession of regulation. 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. It has carved out its own place in Wolfpack history.
It's also full of seniors and super-seniors, including Cunane, Jones, Perez and 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 your season on the line against a less accomplished team that backed into the biggest home-crowd advantage in the entire sport, 90 minutes from campus? 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 that — but UConn earned absolutely nothing, and was rewarded anyway.
N.C. State would have been better off being less successful and getting sent to Wichita — like Louisville, which faced Michigan later Monday night for the final spot 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.
