, and I said that I 'd never actually been to a women 's basketball game . She invited me to one , and 23 months later , I married that woman , Rebecca Lobo , who won a national championship with an unbeaten UConn team in 1995 and a gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 and who helped to launch the WNBA in 1997 as a member of the New York Liberty . I 'm not saying critics are wrong : Perhaps UConn is bad for the sport , the way Secretariat was bad for horse racing when he won the Belmont by 31 lengths , or the way the Beatles diminished pop music by releasing 20 No. 1 hits , or the way da Vinci 's diversity of talents -- artist , engineer , inventor , etc. -- rendered the Renaissance irredeemably dull . Or perhaps exceptional talent and overriding excellence , over time , raises the level of everyone in its proximity , in which case this UConn team might be the best thing that ever happened to women 's basketball . True , when the Huskies play , the outcome of every game is
Hartford , Connecticut -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Few defending champions in sport have had as much to defend as the University of Connecticut women 's basketball team . On Tuesday night , the Huskies successfully defended their title -LRB- beating Stanford 53-47 -RRB- , their winning streak -LRB- 78 games -RRB- and themselves -LRB- against the charge that they 're `` bad '' for women 's basketball -RRB- . They are so much better than every other team , goes the argument of various scribes , yakkers and bloggers , that they 've made a mockery of the game . Never mind that these very pundits have mocked the game for years . Perhaps that 's UConn 's real crime : It 's made a mockery of others ' mockery . I know . I once mocked women 's basketball -- and thank God I did . After I 'd written a single line casually ridiculing women 's basketball in the pages of Sports Illustrated , a woman confronted me in a bar in New York . She asked me how many games I 'd attended before forming my low opinion of the sport . My armpits burst into flames