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2017 – 2018
The attrition: The 2017–18 season is the program's legend, and every piece of it is documented. Four players tore anterior cruciate ligaments: Brianna Turner, out for the whole season with the injury carried from the previous March; senior Mychal Johnson, in preseason practice; freshman Mikayla Vaughn, in November, after six games; and Lili Thompson, a graduate transfer from Stanford, on December 31 against Wake Forest. Seven healthy scholarship players remained. McGraw, at the end, put it in the line the coverage kept: "I didn't think we'd have more ACL tears than losses." The team's only losses all season were to Connecticut in December and to Louisville twice, the second in the ACC tournament final.
The comebacks before the comebacks: In January the Irish came from 23 points down to beat sixth-ranked Tennessee 84–70 at home — a school-record comeback at the time — with the seven-player rotation that would finish the season. The pattern held through the tournament: this team trailed, late, in its biggest games, as a matter of routine.
The semifinal: March 30, 2018, at Columbus: Notre Dame 91, Connecticut 89, in overtime. Connecticut arrived 36–0, had won 147 of its previous 148 games, and had beaten Notre Dame seven straight times. Sophomore Jackie Young scored 32 points. In overtime, with the score tied at 89, Arike Ogunbowale hit a pull-up jump shot with about one second left, and Connecticut's last attempt missed. It was Notre Dame's first win over Connecticut in five years — since the Big East final of 2013.
The final: April 1, 2018 — Easter Sunday again, seventeen years to the day after the first title — at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, before 19,599: Notre Dame 61, Mississippi State 58. The Irish scored three points in the second quarter, trailed 30–17 at the half and by fifteen in the third quarter, and the fifteen-point comeback stands as the largest in a championship game in the tournament's history, passing Louisiana Tech's fourteen in 1988. Jessica Shepard scored 19. With the score tied at 58 and the clock under four seconds, Young inbounded to Ogunbowale, who hit a three-point shot from the corner with 0.1 seconds left. Ogunbowale, who scored 18 in the final, was the Final Four's most outstanding player — the first player in the tournament's history to hit the winning shot at the end of both Final Four games.
The milestones inside it: The championship game was McGraw's 800th win at Notre Dame. She was the Associated Press national coach of the year for the fourth time. And the two titles' symmetry is in the calendar itself: both were won on April 1, both on Easter Sunday, seventeen years apart.
Sources:
- NCAA championship record — the semifinal (91–89, overtime) and final (61–58); the fifteen-point championship-game comeback record; Ogunbowale's most-outstanding-player honor; the 19,599 crowd.
- University record book and season review — the four ACL injuries and the seven-player rotation; the January comeback against Tennessee; McGraw's 800th Notre Dame win in the final; the McGraw quotation.
- Contemporaneous coverage (Associated Press; Scholastic) — Young's 32 points in the semifinal; the timing of the two winning shots (about one second in overtime; 0.1 seconds in the final); Young inbounding the final play.