Paige Bueckers ends legendary UConn career with a fairytale ending

As Paige Bueckers walked off the court in a UConn uniform for the final time, Geno Auriemma greeted her with his arms wide. Bueckers buried her head into Auriemma’s shoulder as the emotion poured out.

“Today was the first [conversation] in five years that all the emotions that have been building inside of me came out,” Auriemma explained. “They came out because in five years that she's been at Connecticut, I've never seen her cry. She might deny it, but she cried because she's going to miss me.”

“He told me he loved me. And I told him I hated him, so,” she joked.

Every season of Bueckers’ career has ended in tears. This time, they were the good kind as she got sent off with a fairytale ending: A national championship.

“It's been a story of resilience, of gratitude, of adversity, of overcoming adversity, responding to life's challenges and trying to fuel them to make me a better person, a better player,” Bueckers said. “To be rewarded with something like this, you can't really even put it into words.”

In the five years since Bueckers first arrived in Storrs, she collected seemingly every individual accolade under the sun. She became the first freshman ever to win national player of the year, racked up three First Team All-American honors, reached 2,000 career points faster than anyone else in program history and ended up as the only four-time regional most outstanding player ever.

But a national championship — which Bueckers coveted more than any personal recognition — eluded her. As a freshman, UConn fell to Arizona in the national semifinal. The next season, the Huskies went down in the championship game to South Carolina. Last year, Caitlin Clark and Iowa got the best of them in the Final Four.

Bueckers’ last shot at a title came down to her last career game. While UConn had played its best basketball throughout the NCAA Tournament, culminating with a record-setting 34-point win over No. 1 overall seed UCL Ain the national semifinal, it still had to go through the defending national champion Gamecocks.

Auriemma had a good feeling, though.

“I just kept thinking something good has to happen because if we were going to lose, it would have been before now. I don't think the basketball gods would take us all the way to the end,” he said. “They've been really cruel with some of the kids on this team. They've suffered a lot of the things that could go wrong in their college careers as an athlete. So they don't need anymore heartbreak. They weren't going to take us here and give us more heartbreak. I kept holding on to that.”

The hunch turned out to be correct. On Sunday, the Huskies walloped South Carolina 82-59 to send Bueckers off with a national championship. The perfect end to a legendary career.

It wasn’t always smooth, though. Few players throughout UConn’s storied history have gone through more than the 6-foot guard from Hopkins, Minnesota.

She began her college career during the bubble season in 2020-21 where the team played in front of empty arenas and couldn’t interact with the outside world. The next year, Bueckers suffered a tibial plateau fracture and lateral meniscus tear that wiped out over half the campaign. The following summer, she tore her ACL and sat out all of 2022-23.

Amid Bueckers’ own health troubles, the Huskies were devastated by team-wide injuries. Last year, even as Bueckers returned, UConn finished with six season-ending injuries.

So to Sunday, she never had a real shot at a national title.

“All those years, I just went home and went, ‘They didn't really beat Connecticut,’” Auriemma said. “When we show up with our whole team and you beat us, then you beat Connecticut. The rest of the time, you beat a patchwork of Connecticut players. So I was okay with it.”

This year, at long last, UConn showed up with a whole team — and nobody could beat Connecticut. The Huskies won every game in the NCAA Tournament by double-digits while their 57-point margin of victory across the two Final Four victories is second-best all-time.

“It was kind of a throwback,” Auriemma said. “These last two games have really been — wow.”

As Bueckers dealt with all the hardship over her career, she often repeated the mantra that everything happens for a reason. By winning a national championship this season, she proved that to be true.

If Bueckers stayed healthy and played the standard four years at UConn before heading off to the WNBA, she never would’ve overlapped with Sarah Strong. Instead, Bueckers came back for a fifth season, teamed up with the freshman phenom and led the Huskies to their 12th national title.

In the end, it all worked out perfectly.

“Everything that's happened through the ups and downs, I wouldn't trade it for the world,” she said.

It’s also fitting that Bueckers didn’t win Final Four Most Outstanding Player — that went to Azzi Fudd. For most of her career, she collected awards she didn’t care about but couldn’t get the national championship she wanted desperately.

On Sunday, Bueckers didn’t get the award. She got the title.

“If you want to win, you just want to win. You don't care. She's been MVP, of everything she's ever been in. So she doesn't need that,” Auriemma said.

With this win, Bueckers has earned her place among the UConn transcendents: Diana Taurasi, Maya Moore and Breanna Stewart. Before Sunday, Bueckers had already done everything she could short of a national championship. It took until her last game but she finally got it and can walk away on top.

“It's destiny,” Bueckers declared.