Minneapolis — Fourteen straight Finals Fours. That's the unprecedented streak the UConn women's basketball team extended with Monday night's heart-stopping 91-87 double-overtime victory over North Carolina State in the Bridgeport Regional championship game.

And it's a lot to live up to, UConn coach Geno Auriemma said.

Auriemma, though, tries to present it to his team as a positive instead of a weighty expectation to carry around.

"What I've done, including with this team, is tell them that this is what we have done," Auriemma said late Monday night. "So going into this game, I was pretty honest with them. I said, 'This is what we usually do in a game like this at this time of the year. And here's why we do it. Here's why we're able to do it.

"'If you all didn't have those same qualities in you, we wouldn't be in this game.'"

Auriemma called it "grossly unfair" for each team that has to try to add to that streak of Final Fours. The string of successes, including six national championships during that time, wasn't created by these players, in particular, but that doesn't matter to people from the outside who see it as one blue-and-white clad robot named "Connecticut."

UConn (29-5) meets Stanford (32-3) at 9:30 p.m. Friday night, beginning its quest to win a 12th national championship. Louisville and South Carolina play in the first game of a national semifinal doubleheader at the Target Center at 7 p.m.

"You didn't create that but that's what follows you around," Auriemma said of the expectations. "You're supposed to use that as an added incentive or as an added boost to where you're going as opposed to a yoke that you're dragging, the tradition that you're dragging, having to live up to it.

"It isn't easy being these kids with the pressures they're under. So I want them to use it as a positive." 

Still a freshman?

• UConn's Azzi Fudd was asked last weekend whether she still felt like a freshman at this point.

Fudd had 19 points in Monday's regional final victory, shooting 7-for-16 in a team-high 49 minutes to earn all-tournament honors — "we put the ball in her hands a lot and we ask her to do a lot and I hardly ever take her out," Auriemma said, "so that's a lot to ask for a freshman."

Fudd's response?

"I would say I do feel like a freshman still in the sense that all of this is so exciting," Fudd said. "And I don't know if it is still so exciting to you guys as it is to me, but I know Christyn (Williams, UConn senior) can say I bug her all the time. I'm like, 'Oh, my gosh, I can't believe we're here. I can't believe we're playing.' And she kind of rolls her eyes sometimes."

Evolution of 'Mama E'

• UConn's Evina Westbrook has undertaken the role of team mom, going by the nickname "Mama E." The task fell to her starting last year as the oldest member of the team when the Huskies had seven freshmen and were trying to negotiate the pandemic.

Westbrook returned to the team this season as a fifth-year senior, unwavering in her leadership role.

"It's kind of funny because people back home knew me as, like, the total opposite," Westbrook said. "I was kind of like the goofy one and the one that like, 'OK, E. Like, focus,' and things like that.

"When I got here I'm like, 'I told some of my teammates to call me Mom.' They're like, 'What? No way.' So yeah, definitely developed that throughout the COVID year. I don't know if we needed it or maybe they needed it. Just something that happened, just developed into what it is now."

Tara's challenge

• Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer was serving as the U.S. Olympic women's basketball coach in 1996 when, prior to the Games in Atlanta, the American team made a stop in Kiev, Ukraine, for a tournament. VanDerveer remembers her players becoming so close to the Ukrainians after playing them multiple times, the U.S. team referred to their hosts as "cousins," the coach said.

VanDerveer calls what's happening now in Ukraine, which is under attack by Russia, "heartbreaking."

She has started a campaign to raise money for aid to Ukraine, pledging to donate $10 for each 3-point field goal made in the NCAA women's tournament. The fund, available at taras3ptchallenge.com, had received $189,986.85 in donations as of Wednesday morning, covering the 749 3s in the tournament to this point.

Former UConn great and WNBA all-star Breanna Stewart of the Seattle Storm has donated $20,000 and NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley has pledged $25,000.

Said VanDerveer: "Basically, I just feel like part of women's basketball and part of women athletes, whether it's the WNBA or our college students, we're aware of the world that we live in, too, and as a coach I took our team to Ukraine. We just felt like we had to do stuff."

VanDerveer said the money will go to three organizations helping in Ukraine: the Save the Children Fund, Americares and GlobalGiving.

Quotable

• Auriemma's wife, Kathy, made a cameo appearance at the UConn press conference Monday, approaching the podium to talk to Auriemma just as he was ready to take questions from the media.

"She said, 'I'm tired of waiting. I'm leaving. Do you have the keys to your car?'" Auriemma said with a laugh. "I said, 'Yes.' She said, 'All right, bye.' It's like all right. There's someone that's mildly impressed with what we did."

v.fulkerson@theday.com