Notre Dame Fighting Irish Defend the NCAA Title Against Baylor Lady Bears

The Baylor Lady Bears and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish will meet in this year’s NCAA Finals, and decide who will be the champion of the women’s college basketball for this year.

These two programmes fought their way to the finals which will be played this Sunday at 6 PM EST, at Amalie Arena, Tampa, Florida.

Baylor Outlasts Oregon

The tall and robust inner line of the Baylor Lady Bears eventually crushed Oregon Ducks and their elastic backcourt. It was 72-67 for Baylor, who posted their 28th straight win.

The Lady Bears made an 11-3 series in the final six minutes, coming back after being down 64-61, forcing the Ducks to miss 12 of their last 13 shots from the field.

After the match, Oregon’s coach Kelly Graves admitted that the better team won.

“They played like champions today and deserve to move on,” Graves said.

A fantastic defense of the Lady Bears stiffed Oregon’s best player Sabrina Ionescu, who couldn’t score in the last 12 minutes of the game. Ionescu was 0 for 7 from the field. She scored 18 points in this one.

The All American who wrote history this year with 8 triple-doubles, had support in Satou Sabally with 16 points, and Erin Boley with 14.

On the other side, Baylor didn’t hit a single three-pointer in this event. They were 0 of 3, compared with Oregon’s 12 of 32.

Kalani Brown scored 22 points shooting 9 of 12 from the field, with 7 boards, Lauren Cox added 21 with 11 boards and 7 dimes.

This was the first game Baylor won a contest at this year’s NCAA tournament which was tight. In fact, it was the first one which ended with a margin of fewer than 25 points. While reaching the Final Four, an average win of the Lady Bears was 38 points.

Notre Dame Rallies Back

The Fighting Iris also had a deficit in the last quarter. With 7:55 to go, Napheesa Collier made a layup to give her UConn Huskies a 64-55 lead. But an 8-0 surge of the Irish brought them back into the game, and for the next several minutes the fans saw a huge battle from which Notre Dame came out as the winner.

The decisive period happened in the last 1:45 when Huskies couldn’t score a single point up until three seconds before the end of the game.

During that time Notre Dame made a 9-0 run which secured the win, and the ticket to the finals.

The player who was crucial in the last season’s Final Four clash, Arike Ogunbowale, decided this one also.

Most of the fans remember her points in the final seconds of the match between these two sides during the previous Final Four. That catapulted Notre Dame to the finals.

This time, there hasn’t been any drama, and Ogunbowale dropped 14 of her 23 points in the last sequence, breaking UConn’s defense into pieces. In the moments when the game was on the line, she made four consecutive free throws to lift the Irish to a 78-73 lead.

Brianna Turner did the dirty work in defense on the final few possessions, with a couple of rebounds, and a huge block on Collier. She protected the basket and denied the effort of the Huskies to come back. Her role in this victory was as important as Ogunbowale’s.

She ended the game with 15 points and rebounds each, Mabrey had 12 points and boards, while Jessica Shepard poured 20, grabbed 13 boards, with seven assists.

For the Huskies, Katie Lou Samuelson had 20 buckets and 6 assists, Christyn Williams 19, Collier finished with a double-double 15 points and 13 rebounds.

Baylor and Notre Dame already played in the NCAA finals once before, back in 2012 when Lady Bears won dominantly, 80-61.

Both schools have two titles with the note that Fighting Irish have four lost finals.