Girls' weekend

So how did you spend your basketball weekend, boys and girls?

Did you spend it watching Shaq's OGs (whoever they were) beat Team Chuck (whoever they were) in the we-got-next carousel that used to be the NBA All-Star game? Or did you catch No. 1 Auburn taking down No. 2 Alabama in what used to be a great football rivalry, but now has morphed into a great men's college hoops rivalry?

Or maybe you watched the Michigan State men come from behind to beat Illinois, 79-65, which pushed Tom Izzo past Bob Knight into first place in career Big Ten victories.

Izzo has 354 conference Ws now, and that ain't an easy thing in the Big Contusion Conference. In the postgame he said he hoped Knight, Izzo's dad and Izzo's predecessors at MSU, Gus Ganakis and Jud Heathcote, were having a drink together somewhere in the Great Beyond.

Nice moment, that, in a stellar weekend for the basketball males.

And for the basketball females?

Well, consider this: I spent lunchtime yesterday watching the two best women's teams in the Ivy League, Columbia and Harvard, duke it out for conference supremacy.

This is not necessarily because I'm six flavors of weird, although my friends and family would heartily second that assessment. And it's not necessarily because sporting events sometimes come winging out of nowhere to grab my attention.

Nah. It's because it felt like the thing to do in a spot-lit weekend for the women, too.

Girls' weekend actually started on Thursday, when No. 1 UCLA took on No. 6 USC in maybe the biggest UCLA-USC collision since O.J. Simpson and Gary Beban went Heisman-on-Heisman in 1967's Poll Bowl. This time it was Juju Watkins 'n' them going bucket-on-bucket with Lauren Betts 'n' them -- and, just like in '67, Watkins and USC got the best of it.

Although "got the best of it" might be understating it a trifle in Watkins' case.

Surely there must be some more high-end adjectives to describe Juju's night, which included 38 points, 11 rebounds, five assists, a steal and eight blocked shots. Oh, and she dropped six threes on just nine attempts, too.

It added up to a 71-60 win over the Bruins, who came in 23-0 and left 23-1. Betts, UCLA's stickout 6-7 pivot, put up an 18/13 double-double and added two assists and a block, but it wasn't enough to stop the Juju-nami. No. 1 got swamped.

But that's not all, as a game-show host would say.

Come Sunday, there was No. 3 Texas holding off No. 5 LSU 65-58 in a showdown between SEC powers with just three losses between them; and No. 12 North Carolina clipping No. 10 North Carolina State, 66-65; and of course Harvard, now 19-3, coming from behind on the road to hand Columbia its first Ivy loss, 60-54.

Oh, yeah. And after that, here came UConn and South Carolina. 

The fourth-ranked Gamecocks were 23-2 and had won 71 straight home games, but Sunday they had nothing for the No. 7 Huskies. Ten days ago Geno Auriemma's crew came up empty against Tennessee, but in the interim they rediscovered their essential, I don't know, UConn-ness or something.

First they floor-waxed Providence by 37. Then they blistered St. John's by 38. And then came Sunday.

When Azzi Fudd went for 28, Paige Buechers added 12 points, seven rebounds and 10 assists, and Ashlynn Shade came off the bench to stick a trio of triples in nine tries. And the Huskies shot 46.7 percent from the arc (13 of 28) and utterly matchsticked South Carolina's home streak, 87-58.

Hell of a performance. Hell of a weekend. Take a bow, ladies.