TAMPA, FLA. -- Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi and Breanna Stewart gathered at the UConn Huskies' team hotel following their alma mater's loss in the 2022 national championship game to South Carolina. The trio of UConn greats wanted to console the Huskies -- and Paige Bueckers.

The defeat was devastating, historic. It was UConn's first loss in a national title game after 11 previous wins, extending the school's championship drought another year. And yet, the alumni wanted to reassure Bueckers, then a sophomore, that heartbreak was all part of the process.

"[The titles] never come without some really trying times," Bird recalls telling Bueckers and teammate Azzi Fudd. "Even if you go 39-0 in a season, it still wasn't perfect." Bueckers' tenure in Storrs, while undoubtedly impressive, has been far from perfect. Her freshman year was held in a bubble amid the COVID-19 pandemic. She missed more than half of her sophomore season and her entire junior year because of knee injuries, most consequentially tearing an ACL in summer 2022. She reached the Final Four three times before this year, and fell short in each instance.

But not this time. In her final game as a Husky, Bueckers earned that elusive national title. She scored 17 points and grabbed six rebounds in an 82-59 victory over defending champion South Carolina that secured the sole accolade missing from Bueckers' résumé and snapped UConn's nine-year title drought.

The past five years for Bueckers and UConn have been defined by their shared pursuit of that coveted championship, with the common thread of getting knocked down and needing to find their way back up.

"When you lose at UConn, it's like the world is ending," Stewart told ESPN. "[We knew] that they were going to get it. It took a little bit longer, but they got here today."

The path might have been circuitous. The process might have been trying. But the ending for Bueckers and UConn? It was as perfect as it gets.

"It's truly storybook," said Rebecca Lobo, who like Bueckers won her first and only national championship with UConn in her final career game. "For her and the journey that she's had, what she's been through, I think, too, it means so much because of all the trials and tribulations she's had along the way."

The entirety of that tumultuous and rewarding five-year journey was distilled in the 10-second hug Bueckers and coach Geno Auriemma shared on the sideline when she checked out of the game for the last time. It was the first time Auriemma had seen Bueckers cry, and he told her, "I love you." It was Auriemma who couldn't hold back tears later, calling this "one of the most emotional Final Fours and emotional national championships I've been a part of since that very first."

"[Bueckers'] journey," he said on ESPN's postgame show, "has been the most incredible for any kid I've had."

NEARLY SIX YEARS to the day before Bueckers cut down the nets in Amalie Arena, she was visiting Tampa as a junior in high school attending the 2019 Final Four for USA Basketball. It was just days after she'd announced her commitment to UConn, her dream school, where she envisioned winning championships and getting the Huskies back on top.

The pairing of Bueckers and UConn proved seamless. With a swagger to her game to pair with her on-court dominance, she took the college basketball world by storm as soon as she arrived in Storrs, becoming the first freshman to win multiple national player of the year awards. She propelled the Huskies to the Final Four, but even after they were upset by Arizona in the national semifinal, it seemed that time was on Bueckers' and UConn's side.

But the middle chapters of Bueckers' career taught her that nothing -- not time, not championship opportunities, not health -- could be taken for granted. She missed 19 games because of a tibial plateau fracture and meniscus tear as a sophomore, later admitting she forced her return too quickly. After tearing an ACL four months later, she sat her entire junior season.

Bueckers pushed through nearly two years of rehab, often masking her anguish. She completely altered her approach to the game and how she takes care of her body, prioritizing better nutrition, embracing Pilates and working with one of women's basketball's most renowned performance enhancement specialists. She leaned into her faith; she said that even if she didn't understand why this had happened to her, she believed there was a reason God handed her this obstacle.

Things went far from smoothly even once she returned to the court in November 2023. Last season took a toll on her as the Huskies confronted a new slew of season-ending injuries. By the postseason, Bueckers was playing some of the best basketball of her career, back better than ever from her ACL injury, but the happy-go-lucky player was nowhere to be seen, replaced by someone feeling so much weight that she'd wake up on game days just wanting them to be over.

"I was so worried about all that could go wrong," Bueckers said, "that you can't even do anything right," which all came to a head in the 2024 Final Four when the Huskies fell to Iowa by two.

This past season, Bueckers' fifth in the program, was different. With the help of a sports psychologist and Auriemma's continued guidance, she learned how to stay where her feet are. To not be so outcome-oriented. How to be more at peace with herself, to run her own race and to not let the pressure amid ever-heightening expectations become a burden.

In the leadup to Sunday, Bueckers wasn't consumed by the fear of losing. Well before she was even crowned a champion, Bueckers said she still wouldn't change a thing about her journey -- and in the end, it made Sunday's emotions all the stronger.

"You recognize the things that you've overcome to get to this point, and you feel like it's all been worth it," she said. "Just an overwhelming sense of gratitude for everything that's happened through the ups and downs. I wouldn't trade it for the world. And to be rewarded with something like this, you can't really even put it into words."

THE 12 NATIONAL championships Auriemma has won over 40 years of coaching don't alter his thinking: Winning is hard, and it requires so much to break your way.

For most of Bueckers' career, he believed that little worked in her favor. Her time in Storrs overlapped with the program's most snakebitten stretch in decades: Since Bueckers' sophomore year, UConn players have sustained 12 season-ending injuries. Bueckers and Fudd, who were recruited to be the most potent backcourt pairing in the country, appeared in just 17 games together prior to the 2024-25 campaign. It was a stretch Fudd described as having "bonded [the team] through trauma."

Even when the Huskies found themselves in the Final Four during Bueckers' sophomore and redshirt junior years, it wasn't with a group that Auriemma thought was healthy enough to have a real shot at winning it all. That's what bothers the coach most, he said this weekend, about how these past few seasons went. Because for as sensational as Bueckers had been, Auriemma has long maintained that she wouldn't be able to lift UConn to a championship -- and knock off the South Carolina juggernaut -- alone.

Finally, in her last season in Storrs, the stars aligned. For the first time in years, Auriemma believed UConn was playing at full strength. "We kind of have a chance to be able to manipulate the game a little bit better than we had before -- that's rewarding," he said Saturday. "That makes up for all the heartache and all the trauma and tribulations that we have had to go through."

Fudd enjoyed her healthiest season since arriving at UConn, playing twice as many games (34) as she had in the previous two seasons combined (17). Freshman Sarah Strong -- who announced her commitment to UConn one year ago Sunday -- surpassed even internal expectations, emerging as one of the best players in the country and a superstar in her own right.

The Bueckers-Fudd-Strong big three reminded Auriemma, as early as December, of some of his other championship cores: Rebecca Lobo, Kara Wolters and Nykesha Sales; Breanna Stewart, Morgan Tuck and Moriah Jefferson; Renee Montgomery, Maya Moore and Tina Charles.

The emergence of this UConn team -- which outside of Bueckers skews younger and inexperienced because of the team's injury spell -- was more of a slow burn, particularly after early losses to Notre Dame and USC (games in which Fudd was limited or unavailable) and a stunning February upset at Tennessee. But 10 days after looking like a shell of themselves in Knoxville, the Huskies showed their first real glimpse of what they could be, demolishing South Carolina by 29 points on Feb. 16 in Columbia -- an indication that they had changed, and a harbinger of what was to come.

"About two months ago, this team fell in love with each other," Auriemma told ESPN's Holly Rowe. "At first they would play, it was like, 'Yeah we like each other, we like each other a lot.' ... I think after the Tennessee game, they fell in love with each other, with the process, with ourselves as a group, and they started liking their coaches. I've never been happier than I've been the last couple of months coaching a team."

Playing with a new mindset, Bueckers saved some of her best performances for her final NCAA tournament, scoring 105 points across the second round, Sweet 16 and Elite Eight, the most points scored in any three-game stretch by a UConn player. She and the Huskies breezed through the tournament in such dominant fashion because of Auriemma's mastery at getting his teams to peak at the right time.

Everything was coming together with the makings of a fairytale ending. That's why, amid his usual nerves, Auriemma kept the faith.

"I don't think the basketball gods would take us all the way to the end [only for UConn to not win]," Auriemma 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 weren't going to take us here and give us more heartbreak."

IT WAS 30 years ago Wednesday that the Huskies celebrated their first national championship by beating Tennessee in Minneapolis' Target Center. They thought they might get their full-circle moment back in 2022, when Bueckers, a Hopkins, Minnesota, product, returned to the state for her second Final Four. But it instead came three years later in the Sunshine State, when that Minnesota kid delivered the Huskies back to the mountaintop in her final collegiate basketball game, riding into the sunset a champion.

Auriemma tried to posit that Bueckers didn't need a championship to be considered one of the program's all-time greats, that her individual play and ability to lift all those around her elevated UConn to heights it wouldn't have achieved without her. People debated what her legacy would be without a ring. But now that's a moot point.

Sunday was her coronation. ESPN's "The Bird & Taurasi Show" displayed after the game a graphic listing Bueckers' collegiate accomplishments: three-time Big East player of the year, three-time unanimous first-team All-American, 2021 national player of the year.

"All those don't count," Taurasi said. "Only thing that counts is she has a national championship. She is a champion. She will forever be in the record books."

And she did it in her own way. After years of being pushed by Auriemma, even criticized by outsiders, to play more aggressively, she didn't take over the game, nor did she need to. Fudd and Strong dazzled with a combined 48 points, and the team played the UConn way. Bueckers is known for her selflessness as a teammate, so it was fitting that she could celebrate in the background as Fudd was presented the Most Outstanding Player trophy.

"It's destiny, and obviously I have a great faith, so I believe God planned it perfectly in the way that it went out," Bueckers said. "It's a great last showing of the great team basketball that we've been playing all season."

Bueckers was the last player to cut down a piece of the net, twirling it around as she let out a roar. She departed the court for the last time in her collegiate career, surrounded by a throng of screaming UConn fans and with the rest of the net around her neck -- enshrined as a national champion.

"There is something extremely validating about winning a championship. There is something about shutting people up when you win a championship," Bird said. "I'd imagine, just given the roller-coaster ride that has been her career in terms of the injuries, I think this would just be such a warm, fuzzy-feeling way to end everything."

Added Lobo: "When you get to the other side and look back, you realize sort of the perfection of it all. How many players end their career with a victory? Very few. It's just sort of the incredible culmination of everything, the exclamation mark on everything that you've done."