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2013 – 2019
The accounting: Notre Dame's first six seasons in the Atlantic Coast Conference set a standard the league has not seen matched: six consecutive regular-season championships, 2014 through 2019, and tournament championships in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2019. The program's own review of the 2017–18 season records the league mark across the run's first four and a half seasons at 66–2. Eleven conference crowns in six years made the ACC, for that span, Notre Dame's league in the way the MCC had been a generation before — at a wholly different level of the sport.
The two interruptions: The Final Four streak itself broke twice in those years, and both endings came against Stanford, a symmetry the record keeps: a Sweet Sixteen loss at Lexington in 2016, 90–84, and an Elite Eight loss in 2017, 76–75, in a regional final the Irish played without Brianna Turner, who had torn a knee ligament in the second-round win over Purdue on March 19, 2017 — an injury that would cost her the whole of the following season and set the terms of the 2018 story told next.
The stars of the span: The run was carried, in succession, by McBride and Loyd; by Turner, the program's career leader in blocked shots (372) and rebounds (1,048) and a three-time ACC defensive player of the year; by Marina Mabrey, who left as the program's career leader in three-point field goals (274); and, from 2016, by the class that would finish the decade: Jackie Young, Arike Ogunbowale, Jessica Shepard and Mabrey together. The apparatus at the end of this section carries their career numbers.
Sources:
- University record book — the ACC title lists (regular season 2014–2019; tournaments 2014–2017, 2019); the 2017–18 season review (the 66–2 league mark); the career record lists (Turner's blocks and rebounds; Mabrey's three-pointers).
- University record book, NCAA tournament history — the 2016 Stanford loss (84–90) and the 2017 Stanford loss (75–76); Turner's March 19, 2017 injury against Purdue.