The plot of a recent "Geena Davis Show" involved a cake. Which might remind you -- OK, probably not -- of a great cake-baking caper on another eponymous sitcom.

There was this "Patty Duke Show" episode where Mrs. Lane, the family matriarch, bakes a cake for a contest, leaves it on the counter and goes off to get her hair done.

Of course, Patty comes in and eats a slice. The short-lived character of the family maid -- played by Margaret Hamilton of "Wizard of Oz" Wicked Witch fame -- bails out Patty by making another cake, then walks out the door and leaves the defenseless cake for little brother Ross to cut up.

Now Patty and Ross must make their own replacement cake, and they enlist the help of identical cousin Cathy. But, Cathy -- this Mensa-like genius who plays theoretical chess and quotes Latin -- for some reason really struggles with reading a recipe. Admittedly, she is not aided by the Three Stooges-like execution of the task by Patty and Ross.

There is the requisite lifting the mixer out of the bowl too soon and coating everything with batter, the throwing of ingredients at each other, the ad-lib measuring. The finished product bears resemblance to a mud slide. (Note: It is mentioned in passing in a later episode that Cathy once attended a swanky French cooking school before she moved to Brooklyn Heights. Leading you to believe either: a.) the show's writers weren't paying as close attention to detail as some of us "Nick at Nite" viewers did many years after the fact; or b.) the French don't do cake.)

So Patty, Cathy and Ross go buy a cake to put in the contest, as does Mr. Lane minutes later (in other words, they cheat), and Mrs. Lane wins.

But, alas, she then informs her guilt-ridden family that the bakery-store owner -- who also happened to be the contest judge -- had called to tell her what the brood was up to, and she had made another cake for the contest.

The time element -- how Mom got home after everybody else left to buy fraud cakes, then got the call, baked another cake and then got to the contest about the same time they did -- is never really explained.

And what the heck, you ask, does any of this have to do with basketball?

Nothing, it's just a ridiculous way to illustrate that things that may seem alike aren't always. The Patty Duke cake episode was good, clean, stupid fun; I didn't watch the Geena Davis cake episode -- I heard all I needed to about it in a commercial: Har, har, har, after part of the cake is sliced off, it ends up looking like male genitalia.

I guess they think nobody will watch kids splatter each other with cake batter anymore.

However, some things that appear the same actually are pretty much the same. Consider what Texas coach Jody Conradt said when asked to compare her talent-rich 1986 NCAA championship team to the current UConn bunch.

"I think when a team is winning and being successful, they're usually happy. I don't think playing time is usually a problem," Conradt said. "I mean, those were the easy days for me, because you knew you could make a number of substitutions and they'd all work.

"The other thing is, it makes practice so much more effective. When you don't have as many good players, the good ones know they're going to play. When you have a lot of good players, they push each other. There's no threat as effective as sitting on the bench."

Here's what UConn's Shea Ralph said about that: "Having players around me that challenge me every day, it's something I love to do. Every day, I come to practice, ready for a battle."

Now, not every championship team has had the kind of depth Texas had in '86 and UConn appears to have now. Purdue, the 1999 champion, wasn't very deep. Tennessee has won championships with teams that, realistically, went about seven deep. UConn's previous championship team, in 1995, wasn't deep.

So depth is not a necessity. But the fact that the Huskies have as many talented players as they do should make the team less likely to have an off game at a critical time -- which is what it might take for UConn to not repeat as national champion.

And it means UConn probably can deal with injuries here and there a little better.

Even so, the Huskies know repeating is not going to be a piece of ... well, you-know-what.

Mechelle Voepel of the Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached via e-mail at mvoepel@kcstar.com.