Geno Auriemma Final Quotations

Since I'm not going to be in Boston playing Sunday and Tuesday (at the women's Final Four) I wouldn't mind being in Indianapolis.

My initial reaction right now is I saw where it's going to be announced during the Final Four. So if I'm sitting here in Connecticut and there's four teams playing in Boston at the Final Four and I get a phone call, my first reaction is I'm going to be (mad) that I'm not at the Final Four. I can tell you that much. So if I happen to be in Boston with my team and I get that phone call, it'll be kind of a special weekend.

I don't care if you have the best team in the country or are Cinderella, this is the hardest game to play in that you'll ever play in. The goal for most people is to have an experience of being in the Final Four. After you've been to the Final Four there's no experience like it, except winning a national championship.

It has been a ridiculous three weeks in terms of my thought process. During all that time when the Final Four was going on, flying out to California, Hall of Fame, all of that, there was a lot going on personally for me where I'm trying to sort out how long am I going to do this? Where am I going to go from here? What else am I going to do?

That would be pretty ironic, wouldn't it? Maybe it's meant to be that way. Hard to say, but it would be pretty neat. How about she's in the starting lineup at the Final Four and knocks in the first play of the game and scores 30 and is the MVP and rides off into sunset? You never know how it's going to be.

Fair or unfair, at Connecticut it's not good enough just to win. There's a perception that if we don't go to the Final Four, it's a bad season. I want the players to understand that the one constant in our program, is that we want to make sure we play hard and have fun.

This is the game that puts you in the Final Four. To come this close and not win and have to come back and wait 12 months and be lucky enough to do it again, it's unbearable.

I'm happy for these kids. The worst thing that could have happened is for them not to get to the final with an opportunity to win a championship. After what happened last week, that would have been really really hard for them going into the NCAA Tournament.

In some places if you get to the Final Eight and lose to the No. 1 seed and win 32 games, there's 6,000 people waiting to meet you at the airport when you go home. But with us, with our tradition, people say, 'What happened?' We're just a team that came close . . . a team that almost had a chance to be great.

I haven't given that one thought. I haven't invested one second of energy on that. All I've been thinking about is how we can get to the Final Four, and now that we're not there, my thoughts are, unfortunately, not necessarily personal.

I do remember my first NCAA win, how unbelievable it was. We won our first NCAA game, then our third and ended up going to the Final Four.