Notre Dame women's basketball beats UConn for third top-five win of season

Shooting threes isn’t Notre Dame sophomore guard Hannah Hidalgo’s thing. Why do that when she can take the ball to the bucket and finish in defenders’ faces over and over and over again until she’s blue — er, green, the color of her uniform Thursday night against UConn — in the face?

She made it her thing against the No. 2 Huskies, though. And they paid dearly for it.

Hidalgo buried not one, not two, not three, but four — yes, four — first-half triples, each splash more deflating for the visitors than the one prior. Notre Dame needed all of them. UConn turned an 11-point halftime deficit into a tightly contested game in the second half, sort of like Texas in the second half of another game against a top-five, undefeated Irish opponent exactly one week ago.

But also exactly like one week ago, No. 8 Notre Dame (8-2) had just enough to get the type of win that feels like March in December. Notre Dame 79, UConn 68 — final. Third victory over a team ranked in the top five at time of tipoff of a season that isn’t even a month and a half old.

“This is a major win for us,” head coach Niele Ivey said. “Obviously, it’s just one win. But I’m really grateful for this group and I’m really proud of our effort and the way we showed it today with such toughness and discipline.”

Through a clean and crisp third quarter offensively, UConn (8-1) got the game to within a single point in the final minute of the third quarter. Hidalgo sensed a turning of the tide and did what she does best — took back the moment and made it her own. Made it Notre Dame’s. She buried her sixth three-pointer of the night to give her side a little bit more of a cushion entering the final frame.

“It was pretty big,” Hidalgo said. “They had their run, went on their run, so it was good to ice that run going into the fourth quarter.”

Hidalgo was her usual, sensational self, finishing with 29 points, 10 rebounds, 8 assists and 3 steals, but it truly was a team effort all the way through for Notre Dame. In the first quarter, the Irish limited the Huskies to 12 points. Sonia Citron made UConn superstar guard Paige Bueckers work hard for everything, an effort that surely wore on the graduate senior Husky throughout the game.

Bueckers scored 25 points on 11 of 20 shooting, much better than she did against Citron and the Irish in scoring 17 points on 5 of 17 shooting in Storrs, Conn., in home loss to Notre Dame a year ago, but it still wasn’t nearly enough for a UConn team that missed 13 of its 16 three-point attempts. The Irish defense makes teams overly reliant on the long ball, and even those shots don’t come easily.

Notre Dame senior guard Olivia Miles, meanwhile, injured her ankle in the game’s first five minutes. She went in and out of the lineup far more often that is customary for the shorthanded Irish, who uncharacteristically played with seven players instead of six only because Marquette transfer Liza Karlen made her Notre Dame debut coming back from an undisclosed lower-body injury.

Miles left early for the locker room just before halftime, slapping a basket stanchion on her way off the floor, hobbling without her shoe on. It seemed like that would be the end of her night in the spotlight — but it wasn’t. She started the second half and played a pivotal role in the fourth quarter, scoring 9 points and forcing a UConn ball handler into a traveling violation at a key juncture in the game.

“Playing with a tweaked ankle, I thought her leadership, her ability to run the point, I thought it was fantastic,” Ivey said. “And when she came back in, she had fresh legs and we just went right at them with a high-ball screen and they couldn’t guard it.”

Miles gutted out 16 points, 4 rebounds and 3 assists in 27 minutes. Senior forward Liatu King was a tone-setter with a sharpshooting midrange jumper early, and she came away with 16 points and 12 rebounds for yet another double-double, her fifth of the season. Karlen contributed 4 points and 2 rebounds in 10 critical minutes that enabled Notre Dame to go two-deep from the bench, a key component in keeping King and freshman center Kate Koval out of foul trouble.

Ivey called King the “X-Factor” of the evening. She said Citron’s defense was unrelenting. She shouted out Koval for a big bucket in the clutch that extended the Irish lead to eight as time was dwindling. She only put seven players on the floor, but she could say something good — a lot of good things — about all of them.

That small rotation, when all parts are clicking and not slowing down, is nauseating for opposing coaches. Just ask the greatest of all time, Geno Auriemma, he of 1,221 career wins and 11 national championships.

“You never sub, so those guys are in there and you got to deal with them the whole game,” Auriemma said. “You’re never looking at them like, ‘They’re going to get a breather sometime soon.’ They don’t. Those guys are attacking you for the entire 40 minutes.”

Auriemma is only the latest coach to have to deal with it, and he’s been on the wrong end of twice in as many seasons now. Only this time, Miles, King, Karlen and Koval are all pieces Ivey did not have at her disposal a season ago. Graduate senior forward Maddy Westbeld should be coming back sometime soon, too.

When she does, who can beat Notre Dame? Maybe nobody.

“If you put Notre Dame against any other team in the country, I don’t think anybody would be surprised if they won that game,” Auriemma said.