Another reminder of how fragile success can be

Hartford - And so the coronation was just about to begin, a swell in the XL Center that would graduate into a roar. Even ESPN broke into its other programming to show history, the 71st straight win.

There's just something about coronations around the UConn women, though, that should invoke scarier thoughts than when your doctor lunges below your equator with a rubber glove.

Remember 1998 when Nykesha Sales got within a point of the school scoring record? Who really would have, could have or wanted to have predicted a ruptured Achilles' tendon at THAT point?

OK. No reason to be a Negative Nelly. Back to Monday night at the XL Center. The coronation. No. 71. ESPN is all aboard.

And then Caroline Doty takes an inadvertent elbow from Ashley Barlow. And then there is Doty, face buried in the XL Center floor.

(Sigh.)

And we wait until today to see whether Doty has a concussion and whether she'll play in tonight's Big East tournament championship game.

Meantime, it sure feels like an auspicious moment to proclaim Geno Auriemma right again.

Because when he says that seasons have an eerie fragileness to them, he's not saying that for effect. He's saying that because amid all the wins, banners and championships, he knows that it could crumble quicker than a card table with CC Sabathia standing on it.

What a fitting, if not creepy, example Monday night provided. On the night when the UConn women set the NCAA record with 71 straight wins, the basketball deities provided a sinister reminder that the only thing you really know is that you never really know.

It's entirely likely Doty will play again. Maybe even tonight. But the freakishness of her sudden fall underscores how quickly something so perilous could happen. And this season, the Huskies, whose bench is thin enough to be spread across a saltine, cannot afford to lose Doty, Tiffany Hayes, Tina Charles, Maya Moore or Kalana Greene.

"That's why, you know, I said all along, I don't care about the streak. It's going to end. I just want it to end the right way," Auriemma said. "I don't want it to end because we got a kid injured. I don't want it to end because somebody got in foul trouble and fouled out. I want to have our best guys out on the floor, the last three minutes, and somebody beats us, and I'll be the first to shake their hand."

Auriemma has cracked that he's already got his speechwriter working on what to say the night the streak ends. And there are so many ways it can happen, even in women's basketball right now, where the Huskies look like the Yankees playing against the Eastern League.

Suppose Doty's injury happened earlier in the game - and she didn't make the three 3-pointers the Huskies needed so badly.

Suppose Notre Dame capitalized on some of the yawningly open shots the Huskies missed. Auriemma, better than anyone else, knows that all he can do is rant, holler and scheme to get his players open shots. Whether they go in is up to the aforementioned deities. Or whether UConn can rent the old Boston Garden leprechaun to sit on the rim.

"For me, what's fun is when I was in the locker room at halftime. I was walking out of the locker room, and I said it maybe four or five times to (director of basketball operations) Jack (Eisenmann) or whoever we were walking out with," Auriemma said. "I said, 'Come on, it's impossible for us to lose, right? There's no way. We're going to win 97 in a row. Do you know how easy it is? Do you know? All you have to do is listen to what everybody says.'

"We put up a whopping 25 in the first half. If I would have told you that before the game and said, 'Hey, we're going to get 25 at halftime,' if I would have said that, you would have said, 'He's an idiot.' So it was just one of those games where you're going to have to grind it out, and that's how it is fragile. It's fragile because you can go like Kalana, 7 for 17, and you could go 3 for 10 from the free-throw line.

"There's so many things that could go wrong, and the other team has to take advantage of it, and you're one injury away from it all falling apart maybe."

With that, Auriemma left the interview room, this wondrous, fragile season getting to the good part. Stay tuned.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.