BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — There were, after all these years, reasons to doubt the Connecticut women’s basketball team almost all season.
There were the injuries and the gutting losses to unranked teams, the near-collapse last week during the N.C.A.A. tournament and the head-spinning sense that a program with 11 national titles had somehow been diminished to underdog status.
But before a partisan crowd on a nominally neutral court in Bridgeport on Monday night, UConn quieted all of that: The second-seeded Huskies beat North Carolina State, 91-87, in double overtime to topple the No. 1 seed in their region and advance to their 14th consecutive Final Four.