Per-fect (adj., n.) 1. conforming absolutely to the description or definition of an ideal type. 2. excellent or complete beyond practical or theoretical improvement. 3. exactly fitting the need in a certain situation or for a certain purpose. 4. entirely without any flaws, defects or shortcomings.

In a quiet corner of the locker room at AmericaWest Arena in Phoenix, Rebecca Lobo pulled her long arms around her knees and sobbed. Her New York Liberty teammates exchanged curious looks and wondered what the deal was.

	Rebecca Lobo and UConn found perfection at 35-0 in 1995.

Sure, they had just lost their first WNBA game of the season, 69-50 to the Mercury, but this was professional basketball and, besides, they were still 7-1. It was just one game in the summer of 1997.

"I didn't know why I was crying, really," Lobo said. "Then it dawned on me. That it was the first time I'd lost in what, two, three years? It was a good streak. Good work, if you can get it."

Better than good. In a word, perfect.

The last time Lobo had lost an organized basketball game was the finale of the 1993-94 season, when her University of Connecticut team fell in the East Regional final, 81-69, to North Carolina. She was the consensus national Player of the Year the following season when UConn won all 35 of its games and the national championship. Then she was a member of the U.S. Olympic team that won all 60 of its games on the way to the gold medal in Atlanta. Factor in her first seven games with the Liberty in the fledgling WNBA and you have a breathtaking run of 102 games without a loss. That's a span of three years and four months.

"When you put it like that it sounds pretty amazing." Lobo said. "But I don't know if perfect is the word I'd use."

Lobo is sitting on the floor outside the locker room at the Westminster School in Simsbury, Conn. The gym is dark and practice for the Springfield Spirit of the National Women's Basketball League is still an hour away, but Lobo is itching to lace them up. Still, she suffers a reporter's questions and talks animatedly about all the weirdly fortuitous things that go into an undefeated season.

Like the perfect storm, so many atmospheric variables must converge at precisely the right time to produce the perfect season.

Nancy Lieberman's Old Dominion teams won a staggering 72 games and two national championships over her last two seasons, 1979 and 1980, but a single loss in each separated the Monarchs from perfection.

"It's like a no-hitter, everything has to be right," said Lieberman, now an analyst for ESPN. "If it was so easy to do, then everyone would do it."

University of Tennessee coach Pat Summitt presided over what stands statistically as the greatest college basketball season ever, 39-0 in 1998.

"No one would have predicted that we would have gone undefeated before that season -- especially me," Summitt said. "As a coach during the season, I'd think there was no way. You have way too much information."

		I think that (the Huskies) have the best starting five in the country. If all five were seniors, they'd all be first-round (WNBA) draft picks. They have a lot of weapons. ... With UConn, they have a balanced attack at both ends. They can beat you at all five spots, and that separates them out.”
		— Tennessee coach Pat Summitt

There have been 83 seasons contested under the umbrella of the NCAA Tournament; the men's began in 1939 while the women's came into being in 1982. Only nine teams have managed to go the distance and finish with an undefeated record: 1956 San Francisco (29-0), 1957 North Carolina (32-0), 1964 UCLA (30-0), 1972 UCLA (30-0), 1973 UCLA (30-0), 1976 Indiana (32-0), 1986 Texas women (34-0), 1995 Connecticut women (35-0), 1998 Tennessee women (39-0).

This year only one team has a chance to make it a perfect 10. The UConn women are 33-0 entering the NCAA Tournament. The next best record in the women's division is 30-2 Stanford. On the men's side -- where parity makes it harder to stay perfect -- top seeds Duke, Kansas and Cincinnati have all lost three times. In fact, since Bobby Knight's Hoosiers did it 26 years ago, no men's champion has finished with fewer than two losses.

Connecticut leads the nation in scoring margin (36.8) and had all five starters -- Sue Bird, Swin Cash, Asjha Jones, Tamika Williams and Diana Taurasi -- make the Big East All-Tournament Team. Four of those players are finalists for the Naismith Award, something that has never happened before.

Some informed observers, Louisiana Tech coach Leon Barmore among them, believe that the Huskies field the best starting five ever.

So history is Connecticut's to make, one way or another. Will they win their six tournament games and remain perfect or will they join those unfortunate, flawed teams that took their eye off the ball just once?

"Everybody's undefeated now," said UConn coach Geno Auriemma on Sunday, after his Huskies were named the tournament's top seed. "Everyone in the tournament has to win six games to win the national championship. Going undefeated, it's not in our thinking. It's not, 'If we lose, we lose our first game of the season.' No. If we lose, we lose our last game of the season."

Talent and toughness
It begins with talent.

The 1986 Longhorns had the best player in the nation, point guard Kamie Ethridge. Their team was so deep that freshman forward Clarissa Davis came off the bench to win the MVP Award at the Final Four. Despite revisionist history that suggests the 1995 UConn team was athletically challenged, Lobo and Kara Wolters both played for the U.S. Olympic team and Nykesha Sales is a star in the WNBA. Tennessee's 1998 team had the best player, forward Chamique Holdsclaw, and won an unprecedented three national titles in a row.

UConn's Class of 2002 might have more pure talent than all of them.

Williams was the 1998 Parade and USA Today national player of the year, while Cash and Jones were first team All-Americans and Bird a second teamer. Taurasi, a sophomore, was the Naismith and ESPN's Scholastic Sports America national player of the year in 2000.

Even spectacular talent needs nurturing, an environment conducive to excellence. It is not a coincidence that these three undefeated teams came from elite programs guided by masterful, hyper-competitive coaches. Conradt's career record at Texas is 786-257 (.754), No. 1 on the all-time victory list. Summitt, who admits losses have moved her to become physically ill, is only two victories behind, at 784-157 (.833). Auriemma, a relative newcomer, is merely 458-98 (.824).

	Kamie Ethridge and Texas found perfection first, going 29-0 in 1986.

"I think it starts with the coach," Lobo explained. "There were times in practice when coach really pissed us off. We'd band together at the baseline and say, 'Screw him, let's do this.'

"The other day I was at practice and he was all over Taurasi. She wasn't really doing anything to deserve it, but you just know he woke up that morning and said, 'I've got to get her going.' "

Barmore understands the components of a perfect season better than most. He was Louisiana Tech's associate head coach under Sonja Hogg in 1981 when the Techsters won the AIAW championship and finished 34-0. In both 1982 and 1990, his teams finished with one loss. In 20 seasons, his career record is 576-86 (.870).

"Oh, it all starts with coach Barmore. I admit it," he said, laughing. "Seriously, the keys are, one, you have to beat the people you're supposed to beat. Two, you better be a tough-minded road team. You need a point guard who can handle the ball under duress."

Jennifer Rizzotti was that tough-as-titanium point guard for Auriemma in 1995. According to Rizzotti and others involved with perfect seasons, going undefeated was not the primary goal, but more of a byproduct.

"Obviously, we wanted to win every game, but we never made it the focus of our season," said Rizzotti, who has coached the University of Hartford team into the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history. "As we continued to go further and further into the season it became a question as to whether we could do it, but it was never the only goal."

Said Conradt, "It wasn't something we talked about. We won that (championship) game pretty handily. I can't remember the exact time on the clock when it seemed certain, but I remember thinking, 'You know what? This was special because we didn't lose.' "

Like many successful coaches, Carolyn Peck breaks up the season into more easily digestible components. Peck, whose 34-1 Purdue team won the 1999 national title with a loss to Stanford as the only blemish, brings a Zen approach to the task.

"Focus is the key," said Peck, now the coach of the WNBA's Orlando Miracle. "If you look forward, you're going to stumble on what's right in front of you. The 1999 team did a great job of living in the moment. The now, the precious present, as Rick Pitino wrote in his book. The quarter you're in, the half you're in, the minute you're in. You can't be anywhere else, so you might as well be the best you can wherever you are.

"Breaking it up kind of takes off the pressure. You go from the first battle, to the second battle, then the third. The points you made from the night before, you can't use them the next night. The same is true of mistakes. It's a new day."

Peck, who has an eclectic reading list, likes to reference "The Japanese Art of War: Understanding the Culture of Strategy," by Thomas F. Cleary.

"It's the philosophy behind the martial arts," she said. "The 1999 team thought I was nuts. Then, in a tight spot, I'd hear a player refer to it. Knock the heart out, strive for normalcy. We practiced hard to be ready in tight games. We were behind in the championship game against Duke, it was no problem because we had already been there."

The 650-pound gorilla
There is a price to be paid for perfection, and it goes beyond hard work and clean living. It's called pressure.

"I definitely remember the zero," said Texas' Ethridge, an associate head coach at Kansas State, a team on the rise that earned its first NCAA Tournament berth in five years. "The stupidity of it is you think you're doing something spectacular and you've been burdened to carry this load.

"Instead of enjoying the moment and the journey, there was just this huge relief in getting it done, and finally finishing the job. That's what most teams feel when they're carrying all that pressure on their back."

	For Chamique Holdsclaw and Tennessee, perfection came in 1998 at 39-0.

Tara VanDerveer, who coaches the Stanford team that ruined Peck's perfect season, lost her shot at NCAA perfection in 1990 when Washington knocked off the Cardinal on an off night.

"I'm not a big fan of undefeatedness," VanDerveer said, perhaps coining a new phrase. "People talk about underdogs. Well, being an underdog is a psychologically better place, a safer place to be. A loss going into the tournament can be very beneficial. Maybe some teams don't need it, maybe (VanDerveer's 1996 U.S.) Olympic team didn't need it because they were such competitive people. But for most teams, I think, it can be a motivator."

After that Washington loss in 1990, Stanford tennis coach Dick Gould told VanDerveer that the loss might prove to be a good thing. It was, of course. Spurred by thoughts of their own mortality -- something you can be sure VanDerveer brought up on a daily basis -- Stanford (32-1) went on to win the national title.

When a team is undefeated, VanDerveer noted, everyone brings their A game.

"It's hard," she said, "because Connecticut has played against everyone's best effort. Does Virginia Tech play every game the way they played against UConn? I don't think so. We play teams and they look so great against us. I'll wonder, where was that crummy team, the one that didn't go to O boards I saw on film, against us?"

As the 1998 season progressed, with a series of dramatic victories over ranked teams, Summitt remembers thinking "Man, I need to lose one here."

Summitt explained her thinking this way: "I thought if we lost a game we would win a championship. I felt that would allow us to understand, first of all, that we could lose and keep us more focused. Certainly, it would have prevented us from going into any game and thinking, 'This is an automatic W.' "

Interestingly, the ultimate crucible of pressure for the undefeated team is not the Final Four. It is the game that delivers them to the Final Four, the regional final. Summitt calls it the toughest game to win, and the experiences of Texas, Tennessee and Connecticut bear that out.

"All of them," said Mel Greenberg, the women's basketball aficionado of the Philadelphia Inquirer, "had that one good scare toward the end."

Consider that: