Championship nights

 They played the NCAA basketball championship game last night, and the top seed in Da Tournament hung on to win by a single point. It was an impeccably contested game, as everyone figured it would be.

The team that won hadn't won a national title in 29 years. Its coach is a college basketball coaching legend who's now won more games than any coach in history, and for whom last night's title was the third.

Her name is Tara VanDerveer.

The team she coaches is Stanford.

It beat Arizona, 54-53, when a contested 3-point attempt by Wildcats' star Aari McDonald died unblessed at the buzzer.

"But wait, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "You said this was the national championship game. Shouldn't you have said it was the women's national championship game?"

Well, yes, I suppose.

But if it's tomorrow morning and I'm writing about the men's NCAA championship game tonight between unbeaten Gonzaga and Baylor, and I call it the NCAA championship game the way a whole raft of folks tend to do, would you have asked the same question?

No you would not.

Because the men are the men, see, and the women are That Other Thing. It has always been thus in the public mind, and that's not the public's fault. That's the way the NCAA itself has always treated it. And that was made starkly evident this month when it got out just how steerage-class the NCAAs were treating the women's tournament as opposed to the men's.

Much "What the HELL?!" tumbled down on the NCAAs as a result, and also a lot of misogynist noise about how the men generate more revenue so they should be treated better. It is 2021, after all. Sticking up for the overdog is all the rage in some circles.

The good news, sort of, is that's a much more egregious insult now than it ever has been. And that's because the women put on such a fabulous show this time around.

Their tournament was as competitive as it's ever been, with 13s beating 4s and 12s beating 5s and Arizona taking down Connecticut in the kind of monumental upset that traditionally puts the Madness in March. UConn, the monolith whose dominance has made the women's tournament all but moot so many years, hasn't won a national title since 2016. 

Four different schools -- South Carolina, Notre Dame, Baylor and now Stanford -- have won the women's championship since.  Which suggests the pool of talent coming out of high school these days is as deep as it's ever been, and it's not all going one or two places.

That's a good thing.

That is, in fact, a great thing.

No qualifiers need apply.