HARTFORD, Conn. -- University of Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma once explained the roots of dominance with the quip that his team's success came down to some simple math. Those Huskies had Diana Taurasi. Other teams did not. Caesar had "Veni, vidi, vici." Auriemma had that.
But Connecticut didn't have a Taurasi this time. And in Kelsey Mitchell, Ohio State did.
In the end it didn't much matter. The result was the same as the previous 84 games. Connecticut came, it saw, it conquered.
Mitchell put on an All-American show with 19 points in the first half, a total that might have doubled if degree of difficulty mattered on the same court Taurasi, Maya Moore and Breanna Stewart each commanded. Connecticut nonetheless sent the crowd home happy with an 82-63 win.
"We're maximizing what we have right now," Auriemma said of his new-look team after four consecutive titles. "Ten-and-0, we beat some pretty good teams. We've taken advantage of what we have and we've tried to hide what we don't have."
Set against the backdrop of the state's capital city, with its downtown that changes only upon the closest of inspection, there is a certain sameness to basketball in Connecticut. Two years to the day before Monday's win, the Huskies beat a pretty good DePaul team by 34 points. That came not quite two weeks after a win at Notre Dame in the rare game against a higher ranked foe.
Sound familiar?
Six years ago to the day, the Huskies beat Ohio State by 31 points in Madison Square Garden. That also happened to be Connecticut's 88th win in a row, the same number of consecutive wins as the UCLA men's team once put together for John Wooden decades before.
The more things change ...
So when these Huskies, despite air balls from their two leading scorers on the opening two shots, jumped to a 19-7 lead at the XL Center, it was a Bill Murray in Punxsutawney kind of vibe. But by the time Mitchell hit a high-arcing 3-pointer to beat the first-quarter buzzer, a shot she launched from several steps beyond the 3-point line and watched with a follow-through held a few extra beats for style, Ohio State was in the midst of what would be an 11-0 run.
The early Huskies run that so often finishes opponents didn't finish the Buckeyes. Every time the Huskies tried to pull away in the second quarter, Mitchell reeled them back in. It is the sheer audaciousness with which she tries to score that is mesmerizing. Step-back jumpers become jump-back. Drives become dances, Mitchell waiting, bouncing for a sliver to appear and then hurling her body into the smallest of openings. Just 2-for-14 in a foul-plagued game against the Huskies a season earlier, she drew a season's worth of oohs and aahs from the stands.
"She's impossible to guard," Auriemma said. "There's no shot she won't take, can't make, it seems like."
Very good players have put up big numbers against Connecticut this season -- Baylor's Alexis Jones and Florida State's Imani Wright among them. And without Stewart around, you could make a case on talent that Notre Dame's Brianna Turner or Baylor's Nina Davis was the best player on the court when their teams played the Huskies. But it has been a long time, at least four years, since the best individual talent was so clearly not in a Connecticut uniform. That was different from years past.
"We knew that we had to make more stops," Katie Lou Samuelson said of the halftime message regarding Mitchell. "But we knew overall that one player wouldn't beat us and we would have to play as a team and try and help out as much as we could whoever was guarding her. We just tried to make her take tough shots. She's really good at making those, but that was our game plan. It worked better in the second half. I think we amped up the pressure a little bit and our help defense was really good."
Mitchell more than once in the first half got a step on Kia Nurse, the kind of thing that feels as if it happens more like once a month to the Canadian Olympian and shut-down defender. So it was that Mitchell found herself shadowed by Crystal Dangerfield for much of the second half, the freshman not asked to shut down the All-American but make her work far from the basket while help from Gabby Williams, Nurse or others waited nearby.
Mitchell scored just four points in the second half.
She scored two points in the third quarter. Samuelson and Napheesa Collier combined for 25 points in the same span. Mitchell wasn't even the game's high scorer. That distinction went to Collier with 27 points. Samuelson was next with 26 points. The same two players who began the game with air balls were ruthless in outscoring Ohio State in the second half all on their own.
When Ohio State turned the ball over, Connecticut capitalized, turning 19 turnovers into 28 points. When the ball moved in half-court sets, it found its way into Samuelson's hands at the 3-point line or Collier's hands inside. They have scored as many points through 10 games as almost any pair of Connecticut players ever. But those points are the final product of an assembly line that involves every player on the court. It is the way every Connecticut team plays.
"We're held to a really high standard," Collier said. "Not just basketball-wise because they understand you're going to make mistakes. They're not asking us to be perfect. But the intensity level that we have to be at and the level of focus that we need is just a lot different than I think at other places, certainly what I've experienced."
She isn't alone in that sentiment. Ohio State has now played Baylor, Connecticut and South Carolina this season, not to mention reigning national runner-up Syracuse. The gap in talent between the Huskies and the pack might have closed. But there is still a tangible efficiency gulf.
"They don't seem to miss a beat," McGuff said. "Every possession they're moving the ball, they're executing, they're cutting. They just do that better than anybody else in the country. They execute what they want to do better than the rest of us. And that's really where we're all trying to catch them."
And therein is the real essence of one of Auriemma's most famous lines. It wasn't just that Connecticut had the best player on the court when it had Taurasi (or Moore or Stewart in the years that followed). It is why Auriemma said Monday he doesn't believe any one player, no matter how good, will beat his team.
"Diana made everybody around her 10 times better than they were," Auriemma said. "That's why it didn't matter who we put out on the floor, we were going to win because, one, she's going to make every big shot; two, when you're open you're going to get the ball and; three, her will.
"So yeah, if we had to play against Diana, I'd say there's one player out there that can beat us by themselves. But she never tried to win the game by herself."
Baylor, Florida State, Notre Dame, Ohio State and Texas have now tried to solve the riddle. Maryland and South Carolina will get their shot soon enough.
"We're not going to win every single game for the rest of eternity," Auriemma said. "We're going to get our ass beat by somebody."
It didn't happen Monday, which made Dec. 19 feel much as it usually does in the Nutmeg State.