Dawn Staley and Geno Auriemma face each other in a national championship game for the first time

MINNEAPOLIS — The line goes across town here, spanning four venues that have recently hosted iconic sports moments with a Philly flavor.

It’s a literal line, too, a light rail route from one of the Twin Cities’ downtowns to the other.

On the way out of St. Paul, you see Allianz Field, the glittering new soccer stadium where Delran’s Carli Lloyd played her final U.S. national team game last October.

Then you go through the University of Minnesota campus, where at venerable old Williams Arena, Washington Township’s Cheryl Reeve won a fourth WNBA title ring as Minnesota Lynx coach in 2017.

After crossing the Mississippi River, U.S. Bank Stadium towers over the edge of downtown Minneapolis, with its design inspired by a Viking ship. It’s been four years since the Eagles won the Super Bowl there, but the echoes still resound as loudly as they do on Broad Street.

Just before the end of the line, you reach Hennepin Avenue. Get off the train there, and you see the place where the latest chapter of this story will be written.

» READ MORE: Dawn Staley wins a third national coach of the year honor

On Sunday night at the Target Center, North Philly’s Dawn Staley and Norristown’s Geno Auriemma will lead their South Carolina and Connecticut women’s basketball teams against each other in the national championship game. Tip time is set for around 8 p.m. on ESPN and ESPN+, with pregame coverage starting at 7.

Staley and Auriemma have faced off plenty of times since she took charge of the Gamecocks in 2008. And they’ve known each other for far longer, between USA Basketball and their mutual ties to former Virginia coach Debbie Ryan, a Mercer County native. Auriemma was one of Ryan’s assistants from 1981-1985, and started a recruitment of Staley that culminated with her arrival in Charlottesville in 1988.

But they’ve never met in the biggest game of all. In fact, they’ve only met once before in the NCAA Tournament, a regional final in 2018.

Now, at last, it will happen.

“I think any time that you’re in this position to compete for a national championship, it’s a pretty big deal, and if you have Philly ties, it’s a bigger deal,” Staley said. “And Geno … he has had a legendary career. He has helped our game grow.”

(And she added, for the benefit of Auriemma’s critics: “Whether people believe that or not, he has helped our game grow tremendously.“)

» READ MORE: Paige Bueckers and UConn top Stanford, 63-58, in a Final Four slugfest

Both coaches swear — literally at times, being who they are — that this game isn’t about them, it’s about their players. (We’ll keep the quotes here family friendly.)

“I don’t think I’ve won one national championship, and I don’t think Dawn is going to win any either,” said Auriemma, whose teams have won 11 titles.

“I think her team has a great chance to win a national championship; I think my team has a chance to win a national championship,” he continued. “But in terms of me personally or Dawn personally … I feel like once this game starts, once you get to tip-off, you kind of relinquish about 80% of the control to the players, and they now have the ability to win it or they don’t. And you can coach the best game of your life and lose. You can make the most mistakes you’ve ever made coaching a game, and your team will find a way to win.”

He’s right, especially in this game. Each team brings one of the biggest stars in the sport, Aliyah Boston for South Carolina and suburban-Minneapolis native Paige Bueckers for UConn. And it will be a great tactical clash, the Gamecocks’ post-oriented offense and ferocious defense against the Huskies’ backcourt brilliance of Bueckers, Christyn Williams, and Evina Westbrook.

They faced off in a tournament in the Bahamas in November, a 73-57 South Carolina win; and they were to meet again in Columbia, S.C., in January, but the pandemic cancelled it.

» READ MORE: Led by Paige Bueckers and Aliyah Boston, UConn-South Carolina has the makings for a dream finale

Staley said her team will watch film of the November game, but not obsess over it.

“We’ll look at it just probably to get our players’ juices flowing a little bit,” she said. “To see this is what we did — this is the kind of effort and more that it’s going to take to basically dethrone Connecticut, and all the things that they’ve done, and the incredible percentage of winning when they’re in a national championship game.”

That percentage, to be precise, is 100. UConn has won all 11 title games it has reached. The Gamecocks are also perfect in title games they’ve reached, but they’re just 1-for-1.

“He is not going to be thinking about, oh, we’re 11-0, we got the 12th one in the bag,” Staley said. “We’re not going to think, oh, here’s UConn, we’re going to automatically win. … We’re going to play off of this year. We’re not going to play their history.”

Auriemma concurred — not least because just game-planning for Boston is enough to think about.

“I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that she might be the hardest person in America to guard,” he said. “She scores if there’s one, two, three, four people on her, it doesn’t matter. She’s able to carve out the space she wants, she gets the ball on the rim whenever she wants, she rebounds whichever ball she goes after.”

» READ MORE: Aliyah Boston leads South Carolina past Louisville, 72-59, and into women’s title game

Now the stage is set for a clash of powerhouses.

“A lot of what we’re able to do and get is off the backs of their success,” Staley said. “The people up at UConn treat their women’s basketball team as a sport — they’re forced to because of all the winning and all the success.”

So does South Carolina’s fan base now, packing the school’s arena with the biggest crowds in Division I women’s basketball for seven straight seasons. A second national title would further cement the Gamecocks’ perch at the top of the sport.

Sunday’s national championship game will be the 11th time Dawn Staley and Geno Auriemma coach against each other. Here’s a look back at their past games.

Dec. 28, 2008: Connecticut 77, South Carolina 48 at Columbia, S.C.

Feb. 9, 2015: Connecticut 87, South Carolina 62 at Storrs, Conn.

Feb. 8, 2016: Connecticut 66, South Carolina 54 at Columbia, S.C.

Feb. 13, 2017: Connecticut 66, South Carolina 55 at Storrs, Conn.

Feb. 1, 2018: Connecticut 83, South Carolina 58 at Columbia, S.C.

March 26, 2018: Connecticut 94, South Carolina 65 at Albany, N.Y. (NCAA Tournament regional final)

Feb. 11, 2019: Connecticut 97, South Carolina 79 at Hartford, Conn.

Feb. 10, 2020: South Carolina 70, Connecticut 52 at Columbia, S.C.

Feb. 8, 2021: Connecticut 63, South Carolina 59 (OT) at Storrs, Conn.

Nov. 22, 2021: South Carolina 73, Connecticut 57 at Paradise Island, Bahamas (Battle 4 Atlantis championship game)