A Rivalry Renewed: Lady Vols roll into matchup with UConn after an Alabama win that would make Pat Summitt proud

Picture this: it’s 2007.

Pat Summitt has just won her seventh national title at Tennessee, further cementing her status as one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all time.

Her annual battles with UConn head coach Geno Auriemma are the stuff of legend, with the Huskies and Lady Vols battling tooth-and-nail each time the teams square off.

Suddenly, though, it’s all over. Or seems to be.

Summitt cancels the rivalry with Auriemma’s Huskies, and in 2010, she hints at recruiting violations as her reasoning for the move.

“Seldom do you see that (recruiting violations in women's basketball),” Summitt said to Sports Radio WNML, courtesy of a report in the Hartford Courier. “I probably had Connecticut on my mind. There's a reason we don't play them."

But in 2007, that reasoning had not yet surfaced.

Now, fast forward 13 years.

The year is 2020, and Tennessee’s women’s basketball team is once again slated to take on Auriemma’s Huskies.

Thursday night’s matchup will mark the first since Summitt’s cancellation, and what has transpired in between— Summitt’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Holly Warlick’s promotion, Summitt’s death, Warlick’s firing, and former Lady Vol point guard Kellie Harper’s hiring— makes the renewed rivalry matchup even heavier.

So no one could blame Harper, in just her first year as head coach, if she followed her fans’ lead by overlooking Monday night’s home matchup against Alabama.

She didn’t, and, thank goodness for Tennessee, neither did Rennia Davis.

Later, Harper would joke that the play was by design, that Davis’s long, arcing shot was originally supposed to drain three entire seconds off the clock.

Either way, it worked.

With time plummeting toward zero and Tennessee trailing by one after a gritty matchup, the Lady Vols’ chances bounced in Davis’s right hand.

She juked right, sidestepping an Alabama defender and working away from the basket.

Only then did Davis let it fly, a 30-foot prayer that would’ve made her coach’s coach proud.

Nothing but net.

Davis strutted toward the other end of the floor, her team mobbing her in response with 00.3 seconds left.

Ballgame.

“If anybody is going to make that it's going to be Rennia,” Harper said.

"It was somewhat what we drew up, but the step back is kind of my shot,” Davis added. “I was looking for that shot and I knew my teammates were looking for me to shoot."

She did.

And because she did, Tennessee heads into its latest chapter with third-ranked UConn much more confident than it would have had the ball not fallen.

Now, the Lady Vols face a rematch against a familiar foe, just a few weeks removed from a program-defining win for Harper on the road at then-no. 15 Notre Dame.

But UConn is different. And this team knows it, too.

Take the issues between Summitt and Auriemma.

Take the fact that this week marks the ninth annual “We Back Pat” initiative for the Southeastern Conference after the campaign’s launch in 2011, and know that there is no matchup more fitting to Summitt’s legacy.

Heck, even take the recent transfer of Evina Westbrook, who left the Lady Vols’ program following some personal issues and fled to UConn, where Auriemma fired shots at Tennessee’s program, even at Harper in her first year at the helm.

Take all of those storylines, and wad them up into one glorious paper ball.

Because this matchup will be one worth watching. And, like the Alabama game, it will be one to make Summitt proud.

Not because of the final score.

But because of the effort with which this team, a Harper team and, by extension, another Summitt team, will play.

“We just gotta play our game like we've been doing,” Davis said Monday. “Just gotta play Lady Vol basketball.”

“For forty minutes,” added freshman Jordan Horston.

And if they do that, these Lady Vols will have found their own way to “Back Pat.”

As they should. Because Geno never has.

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