NEW ORLEANS — On a night when the NCAA honored some of the legendary names of the early years of women’s college basketball, the Connecticut Huskies continued to remake the contemporary history books.

Their 93-60 win over Louisville on Tuesday ties them with Tennessee for an NCAA record eight national championships. And UConn rolled in record-setting fashion in the most lopsided title game, eclipsing the 23-point margin of victory by Tennessee when it won its first championship in 1987.

UConn's 8th national championship ties Tennessee for the NCAA record. (Photo by Wendy Parker)

That was the last time a freshman, Tennessee’s Tonya Edwards, was voted the best player at the Women’s Final Four. On Tuesday, UConn rookie Breanna Stewart ended that drought with a 23-point, 9-rebound outing to complete a brilliant tournament performance.

For UConn coach Geno Auriemma, who also ties retired Tennessee legend Pat Summitt with those eight titles, the victory “validates a lot of what we wanted to do, what we aspired to be.”

But he found other comparisons — referring to an ESPN graphic showing him on a list of college coaching greats, including John Wooden, Mike Krzyzewski and Adolph Rupp — not quite right.

“I never beat Coach K in a game and I never coached against John Wooden,” said Auriemma, who like Wooden is undefeated in national championship games. “The only person I compare myself to is Pat Summitt. To be there in that spot with her means a lot to me.”

Before he could join her at the top of that list, Auriemma had to figure out how to rectify what at least by UConn’s own standards could be called a funk.

Two confounding last-minute losses to Notre Dame in early March didn’t inspire much confidence.

Neither did Stewart, whose play at times had Auriemma mussing his hair more than usual.

But he said he felt “something click” in UConn’s NCAA second-round game against Vanderbilt, and in successive games against Maryland and Kentucky. By the time their reached the Final Four, Stewart and the Huskies were clicking from every spot on the floor.

“I think a lot of people on the outside doubted it,” senior forward Kelly Faris said of UConn’s reversal of fortunes.

She said that after the Notre Dame loss in the Big East Finals — their third of the season to the Irish — Auriemma told them in the locker room that “I’m going to show you how to win a national championship.”

Added Faris: “I don’t know how the heck he does what he does but he’s pretty darn good at his job. I’m glad he’s on my side.”

Among the things Auriemma did was to tweak  his lineup, bringing speedy guard Bria Hartley off the bench, in part to provide a spark. Stewart, a lanky 6-foot-4 forward Auriemma predicted would be one of the greatest UConn players ever upon her arrival, placed enormous pressure on herself to succeed quickly in a program where national championships are expected.

Extra shooting time in the gym with associate head coach Chris Dailey gave Stewart some solace, and the confidence to crack through mental barriers.

“She has a little kid’s attitude towards everything that happens,” Auriemma said. “She sees the fun and the joy in everything, and there were times that all went away, and I was really, really worried about her.”

Against Notre Dame in Sunday’s semifinals, Stewart scored 29 points, and was just as sterling in the championship game. As impressive as her scoring was her full Final Four storyline — 14 rebounds, four assists, four steals and seven blocked shots.

In addition to her languid shooting form, Stewart demonstrated her pure athletic ability after a missed UConn shot against Louisville, bolting high for the rebound and grasping the loose ball with her long left arm before heaving it back up and into the basket in one motion.

“I don’t think people understood how much we needed her,” Faris said. “If we don’t have her, we’re not here.”

Stewart demurred when asked about her Most Outstanding Player honor: “I appreciate it. But we just won the national championship and that’s the best thing.”

In Louisville (29-9) UConn was facing what Auriemma called “the only team that’s been better than us the last month.” The Cardinals shocked defending national champion Baylor in the Sweet 16, upended Tennessee and prevailed over Cal in the national semifinals in large part due to superb 3-point shooting.

Geno Auriemma said the only team that's played better than UConn in the NCAA touranment has been Jeff Walz' Louisville Cardinals. (Photo by Wendy Parker)

Before Tuesday’s game, Louisville men’s coach Rick Pitino, who traveled from Atlanta after his team won the NCAA title Monday night, gave the women’s players some pre-game inspiration.

They started out fine, leading UConn 14-10 when the Huskies went on a blistering 19-0 run in the first half. It wasn’t just Stewart, who had 18 of her 23 points before halftime. Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis tied an NCAA title game record with six 3-pointers as UConn’s 93 points, including 13-for-26 shooting from 3-point range, represent the second-most by an NCAA champion.

“They just hit big shot after big shot,” Louisville coach Jeff Walz said. “What makes them so unique i their ability to score from all five positions on the floor. You got to kind of pick your poison.”

And UConn limited Louisville to 5-for-23 from the 3-point line, holding hotshot guard Shoni Schimmel to just nine points.

UConn’s historic performance came as former stars in the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women were honored at halftime, along with administrators during the period of organized women’s college athletics from 1972-1982.

Among the standouts on hand were Theresa Grentz, of the first three  AIAW championship teams from Immaculata College, as well as Naismith Hall of Famers Lusia Harris (Delta State), Carol Blazejowski (Montclair State), Ann Meyers (UCLA), Lynette Woodard (Kansas).

They witnessed an 18-year-old player who’s been pegged to be the next great star at UConn — joining the company of Rebecca Lobo, Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird and Maya Moore in the pantheon of contemporary college greats.

With them, Auriemma has won all of his titles in the past 18 seasons. It was in 1991 in New Orleans that the upstart Huskies joined storied Tennessee, Stanford and Virginia in the Final Four.

“When we left and we didn’t win, I thought: ‘What if we never go back? What if it’s that one and done?’

“And when we won our first national championship in 1995, I thought: ‘Lots of people won one. What if we don’t win another one ever again?’ So I’m always looking into the future and thinking: ‘Is this it? Is this the last one?’”

With Stewart around for three more seasons and just two regulars departing — although one of them is the invaluable Faris –UConn’s run appears to be far from over.

“I don’t see how that’s going to change,” Walz said on Monday about UConn’s dominance, “unless he decides to retire, which I think he should.”

Instead, further comparisons to Wooden and his 10 NCAA titles will continue, probably to Auriemma’s chagrin.

“To see where we’ve come from and what’s happened at Connecticut in the last 18 years, I would say that never in our wildest dreams did we think this was possible.”

This week espnW has been running a series examining the possibilities of women competing in men’s professional sports leagues. Veteran reporter Jane McManus does a good job detailing the physical and cultural obstacles women face in football, while Pat Borzi does the same in baseball.

I do admire the women facing very long odds of ever succeeding on the most-dominated fields of play that exist in American sports, and I don’t suspect the cultures of baseball and football will ever embrace women as basketball and soccer have. Theirs is a passion bordering on obsession that is hard to deny — and it is generally a healthy obsession. Perhaps some of these women may parlay that passion into front office and off-the-field careers that are rarities today, or inspire other females to do so.

I also understand the media fascination with this subject, because this is another part of the women’s sports realm devoted to novelty. In fact, the entire field of women’s athletics for many — including some of its biggest advocates — is regarded as experimental ground for working through social issues.

Another trendy topic that gets women’s sports advocates all aflutter is American-style gridiron football — whether it’s championing the fledgling pro women’s league that’s been around for several years or condeming the new lingerie variety that has some of the Sisters of Perpetual Indignance absolutely beside themselves.

But while the latter is mildly amusing, the rest of all this is frankly boring. While women have made enormous athletic and physical strides in my lifetime, the constant obsession — and this is an unhealthy one — to see whether women can really hold their own against men is more than quixotic.

It takes away from acknowledging the most remarkable development there has ever been in women’s sports: The everyday exploits of females on fields, courts, pools and other venues of play, just to play. They’re not always doing so to chase a college scholarship, or aim for professional or Olympic glory, although some get that far. Hardly any do it to prove themselves against men.

It’s been this critical mass, built up over decades, that has helped lead to entities like the WNBA, which is holding its own after a sometimes-rocky decade and a half of existence. Yet in Thursday’s espnW installment, Diana Taurasi is asked the inevitable question about women playing in the NBA, and she handles it well enough. But her fellow pro hoopster Tina Thompson, the last active charter WNBA member, really throws it down the best:

“The question is insignificant. The point of creating the WNBA was to have a league of our own.”

Thank you.

With all due respect to an intriguing topic, what’s the point of all this? I thought it was a marvelous moment for women’s sports earlier this year when the frat boys of American sports media got all worked up with comparisons between the winning streaks of the UConn women and the UCLA men. These are the things that make sports great — the arguments on talk radio, message boards and social media that never end, and always fascinate. Who was better? Mays or Mantle? What about DiMaggio or Williams? Russell’s Celtics or Magic’s Lakers? Lombardi’s Packers or Montana’s 49ers? You’re forgetting the Bulls and the Steelers, idiots! Etc., etc.

That a women’s team sport had reached such a lofty perch in the mainstream sports spotlight was perhaps as notable as what it accomplished on the court. Even amid the clamor of this being apples and oranges, or claims that the UConn women could never beat the UCLA men on the floor.

That was never the point. Neither has it been the purpose of the development of women’s sports to see whether the best females they produce might have an actual shot against the men. There’s a fairly obvious reason why most sports are sex-segregated, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. While the espnW series thankfully doesn’t address the absurd claims of Colette Dowling in “The Frailty Myth,” it still gives far too serious credence to an unrealistic, as well as an insignificant, question.

As I read these stories, I detected a ghost that haunts women’s sports advocates — the fear of invisibility. The barrier-busting, “woman in a man’s world” narrative holds media attention, but only as long as the novelty lasts.

Auriemma, who will lead the American national team in the London Olympics, said at a U.S. training camp this week in Las Vegas he doesn’t worry about the comparative lack of attention for women athletes:

“We could go 39-0 (at UConn) three years in a row and not get the amount of media that goes to a men’s Final Four. It’s just part of the deal. People are either going to appreciate you or they’re not. I’m sure there is an (Olympic) swimmer who says, ‘I’m up at 5 a.m. every day. Where is everyone?’ Or the guys on the crew team who say, ‘We’re in the water busting our ass every morning. Where is everyone?’

“Does it bug me? No. When you look back five years, the attention is better now than it has ever been. I would just like it if one of our players made a 3-pointer at the buzzer to win the gold medal, she wouldn’t have to take her shirt off to get the coverage it would deserve.”

I firmly believe that the biggest challenges facing women’s sports in America have nothing to do Title IX or wasted cultural obsessions, but with broadening their mainstream appeal, attracting corporate sponsors, working to establish the viability of professional leagues and taking the ideological fury out of getting in the game. Some may find it boring and even dispiriting, but some recent developments make this even more imperative:

– The extremely endangered state of the Women’s Professional Soccer league has taken another heartbreaking turn. If this 3-year-old circuit, now down to six teams, makes it through the season, it will be a miracle.

– The WNBA continues to get a strong endorsement from David Stern, and as long as he feels that way it isn’t going anywhere. But he didn’t dance around his rationale for recently hiring successful marketing executive Laurel Richie as the new WNBA president. He wants to strengthen the league as a business.

– Even the venerable LPGA, now 61 years old, remains on enough fragile financial ground that a respected and fair-minded golf journalist not long ago created a possible scenario for how it might thrive as part of the PGA.

The next barriers to be broken for women in spectator sports will not be about crashing men’s leagues, but making the leagues they have and the games they play compelling and worthy to just more than a small, intense few.

In some ways, not becoming a novelty might be a more difficult feat to pull off.

Since there’s been a lot of drive-by commentary about the UConn women’s basketball streak from sportswriters who admit they don’t follow, nor do they much care, about the sport, a few simple lessons in interpreting Geno Auriemma are necessarily in order.

But first, thank God for Bob Ryan. The legendary Boston Globe columnist and basketball maven with a deep appreciation for every level of the sport, regardless of gender, truly gets what the Huskies and their star player embody:

“Similarly, I saw a great basketball player two nights ago. Her name is Maya Moore, and she won’t be playing in the NBA. But I’d go watch her play her dunkless game any ol’ time, because she is a pure basketball player. She can shoot, pass, rebound, defend, and, finally, lead. It was an under-the-microscope performance before what will be the best audience for women’s basketball until the NCAA championship game several months hence, and she personally made sure UConn would get that record. The final scoring total was a career-high 41, but that didn’t matter. Twenty-one, 31, 41 . . . she put on a show. She’s not Kemba Walker physically, but she’s as good a basketball player, and I bet the standout UConn point guard would love to play with her.”

Yes, Ryan gets it, because he’s a basketball purist at heart, while far too many members of the sportswriting Tribe were too busy genuflecting about Auriemma, doing their 24/7 all-platform wiseguy best to respond to a wiseguy coach, or disparage his team’s accomplishments, all too literally.

They just don’t get it.

They don’t get what Auriemma was really doing after he dashed off this doozy in response to all the attention at Madison Square Garden as the Huskies won their 88th consecutive game over Ohio State on Sunday:

“There wouldn’t be this many people in the room if we were chasing a women’s record. The reason everybody’s having a heart attack the last four, five days is because a bunch of women are threatening to break a men’s record … All the miserable bastards who follow men’s basketball that don’t want us to break the record are all here because they’re pissed.

“If we were breaking a women’s record everybody would go, ‘Aren’t those girls nice?’ Give them two paragraphs in USA Today, give them one line on the bottom of ESPN and let’s send them back where they belong — the kitchen.’ “

Auriemma wasn’t yelling, or even raising his voice, when he said those words. His voice was low, his demeanor calm. But to the untrained ear those remarks can seem harshly sharp and piercing, if not offensive. It didn’t take long for the overreaction to the reaction to spring forth like a geyser.

To the sports blogs who find room for women only in bimbo poses, this was just another example of Geno being an insufferable douche.

Yahoo’s Les Carpenter doesn’t get it. Geno wasn’t really angry.

Surprisingly, SI.com’s Ann Killion, whom I respect and has spent some time around the women’s game, doesn’t get it either.

Business Insider, a Silicon Valley blog, even piled on the UConn streak, but Dashiell Bennett clearly doesn’t get it.

And the knuckleheads who come up with such original observations as “women’s basketball sucks” and why don’t you play a men’s team? have truly revealed their level of intelligence. So do those who complain of having the sport shoved down their throats in an age of 500 channels.

(Some defenders of the womens’s game — and not just those named Christine Brennan – have come across as overly thin-skinned, and this doesn’t help the perception of the sport either.)

Was Auriemma taking a serious swipe at detractors of the women’s game? You betcha, and it’s important to understand that he was making a very direct point about all of this.

But for those who know the deeper message behind nearly everything Auriemma says for public consumption, it’s this:

This is Geno, just being Geno. It sounds off the cuff and unscripted and rash, and his extemporaneous talents are as remarkable as how he prepares his team to play.

But this is also coldly calculating stuff, designed to absorb all the pressure that might otherwise be heaped on his players, who had little trouble mowing down Florida State for No. 89, with John Wooden’s grandson in the house.

Some opiners think this is Geno hogging the spotlight, egomaniacally, injecting himself in the middle of a debate he has ratcheted up. As Killion writes, there is some truth to all of that. He does like attention and being a lightning rod in a sport that rarely gets this kind of early season exposure. He’s a breath of hot air and fresh air at the same time.

But Auriemma’s tactics should be recognizable to some of these opiners, since the coaches he resembles the most are soccer’s self-dubbed “Special One,” Jose Mourinho, and the Ol’ Ball Coach himseelf, Steve Spurrier.

After his England club Chelsea lost to Barcelona in the first leg of their 2005 European Champions League series, Mourinho accused Frank Rijkaard, then the Barcelona manager, of entering a referees’ locker room beforehand.

Chelsea roared back to win the second leg 4-2 and the series 5-4, and Rijkaard lost his grip on the reins of Barcelona. (Mourinho, now at Real Madrid, did get some comeuppance recently when Barcelona throttled Les Meringues 5-0.)

It was Spurrier that Auriemma channeled at a Knoxville hotel sports bar the night before UConn’s game at Tennessee in 2002, when a photo of the Ol’ Ball Coach flashed on a television screen as he was to the Washington Redskins. To anyone within earshot Auriemma cried out:

“I want to be the Steve Spurrier of women’s basketball!”

The locals didn’t like hearing it — after all, it was Spurrier who said, during his Florida days, that “you can’t spell Citrus without ‘UT.’ ” Then again, Auriemma had spent the previous days referring to Tennessee as the “Evil Empire,” and expressing how much he loathed the color orange and “Rocky Top.”

Final score? UConn, 86-72. The run-up to that game proved to be a tipping point in the now-dormant UConn-Tennessee rivalry.

After losing a prized recruit, Brittany Hunter, to Duke, Auriemma’s words became bulletin board material in Durham for a Feb. 2003 matchup and what would become the first women’s sellout at Cameron Indoor Stadium:

“You know, there are just as many Duke graduates waiting on tables as there are from any other school in the country. They may just be working at a better restaurant.”

Relaxed, Auriemma even joked around with Duke students camped out at Krzyzewskiville, waiting for North Carolina tickets.

Final score: UConn 77-65, and it wasn’t even that close. The following season, Hunter transferred to UConn, but injuries shortened her career.

Even after UCLA’s mark had been eclipsed, the media grousing continued. ESPN.com’s Johnette Howard, who also has been around the women’s game for a number of years, snorted that perhaps Geno ought to go coach men already, reflecting a fairly healthy sentiment that still exists in the women’s coaching community. Then Howard descended to this:

“Auriemma is hardly the first coach or high achiever who can be ultracompetitive or self-referential, contradictory or complicated. But he has never been spanked as much as he should have for how he has treated Tennessee’s Summitt.”

Well, let’s open up those old wounds, shall we? Howard’s spanking — it’s hard to tell whether she enjoyed it, though — should put to rest the worries some in the Connecticut media have had the last couple years that America had taken the fun out of Geno.

Not any longer. While he’s back to his old self, and God continues to smile on the Huskies, far too many star media opiners are taking him far too seriously to get why he does what he does.