All of these were wonderful. In many ways, the Pulido shot was meaningless, but in the system that is UConn WCBB, it was transcendent. There were plenty of others. There was a Maya steal that led to an amazing basket. Huge passing plays started by wonderful defense. So many jaw-droppers.
But I would suggest that a relatively meaningless game that UConn placed one Saturday at Villanova some time in the early 2000s. Possibly the year before they won the national championship in Philly. I can place it only because I was living in Philly at the time and took my daughter and persuaded some coworkers to attend as well. Anyway, this game was important not because UConn won. That was expected and they whipped Villanova. It was important to me because it was the first time I realized that a team that played Geno's style could, for brief periods of time, play perfect basketball.
In this game, there was a period of maybe 7 minutes in the second or third quarter, I forget which, when they could simply do nothing wrong. No matter what Villanova tried (and this was not a bad Villanova team, either ), UConn turned it into a basket. And not just a basket, but an elegant basket -- a superb passing play or a steal leading to a fast break basket, stuff like that. It went on and on, and Villanova could do absolutely nothing about it. I'm not sure many teams could have done anything about it, either.
Anyway, as I was trying to explain to my coworkers what was going on, I realized that they were approaching basketball perfection, which until then I had not thought possible. This was long before Geno ever said anything about trying to be perfect, so it was a real brainstorm for me. I started watching the games differently after that, looking for those brief stretches of perfection (I've seen a few others over the years) and like many other fans, not being happy with average plays or mistakes.
