They don’t come any tougher — especially mentally — than Dawn Staley. She didn’t, by accident, drive her way out of North Philadelphia to become an All-American, All-WNBA and Olympic gold medal-winning player, and then an iconic, hard-charging national championship-winning coach.

So here’s guessing she’ll be fine, or already is fine, no matter the strange and wild outburst she endured from Geno Auriemma on Friday after her South Carolina Gamecocks defeated his UConn Huskies 62-48 in the national semifinals.

“We move on,” Staley said on ESPN, still seeming bewildered by what exactly had happened.

Indeed, she and her team move on to bigger and more important things, namely Sunday’s national championship game against UCLA, where Staley could win her fourth title as a coach.

Staley shouldn’t spend a second looking backward.

It’s Auriemma who needs to figure out how to deal with this. Not just in trying to make amends — he issued an apology Saturday (in which he didn’t mention Staley by name) that he should have delivered immediately. More importantly, he needs to keep it from ever happening again, because he has too much to lose if he doesn’t.

To recap, Auriemma began barking at Staley during the postgame handshake, which should have been congratulatory but instead got contentious. There these two were, shouting in each other’s faces, having to be held back by assistant coaches.

It was like some cartoonish WWE bit (it’s not like Staley was going to back down, after all). And it was over, what exactly?

Auriemma kept trying to dodge the question postgame before finally saying he was troubled that Staley hadn’t shaken his hand before the game (she actually had) and that he had stood around for “three minutes” waiting for her to meet him at center court.

“I just said what I had to say,” Auriemma said.

Except it didn’t need to be said. Whatever perceived slight Geno felt should have been internalized. He would never accept a player being thrown off her game from such a minor incident.

Instead, in a fit, he came across as petty, personal and completely unbecoming of who he’s always been.

Some of that sanity sunk in by Saturday afternoon.

“There’s no excuse for how I handled the end of the game vs. South Carolina,” Auriemma said in a statement. “It’s unlike what I do and what our standard is here at Connecticut.

“I want to apologize to the staff and the team at South Carolina,” he continued. “It was uncalled for in how I reacted. The story should be how well South Carolina played, and I don’t want my actions to detract from that. I’ve had a great relationship with their staff, and I sincerely want to apologize to them.”

Auriemma is an absolute legend in women’s basketball; a Hall of Famer, a gold medal-winning coach, a 12-time NCAA champion. Maybe most remarkably, 41 years into his career, he’s as good as ever. UConn is, at least until Sunday, still the reigning national champion. The loss to South Carolina broke a 54-game winning streak.

It’s more than just all these victories — 1,288 of them, at a .886 clip. It’s how he won them.

An Italian immigrant who grew up in Philly himself, Auriemma did it with intensity, bravado, charisma and unapologetic competitiveness. He took no quarter. He never accepted that women’s basketball should take a back seat to anything.

He’s never been for everyone. His scraps through the years have extended from NCAA administrators to chief rival Pat Summitt to even UConn colleague Jim Calhoun, who built a dueling powerhouse on the men’s side in Storrs.

Auriemma, along with Summitt and others, helped redefine women’s sports by ignoring a society that saw women athletes as fragile and instead coaching them just as athletes, thus driving them to levels no one saw as possible.

In the process, he lifted the entire sport by redefining greatness, annually raising the bar and by doing it in the Northeast, backyard to the national media.

You can’t write the history of women’s basketball, or basketball at all, without Geno Auriemma. The entire operation owes him.

Which is what makes Friday so disappointing to even his greatest fans.

At age 72, he needs to be particularly mindful of his actions. He needs to be supportive, not petulant; gracious, not emotional. He’s the elder statesman, not the kick-down-the-door young guy. Lashing out is an act of ego and immaturity. He’s better than such antics.

He needs to lift others up, even after bitter defeats, not try to tear them down.

He’s done too much, accomplished too many things, positively impacted too many people to tarnish his legacy in the final chapters of what is otherwise one of the greatest stories ever told.

MANCHESTER, England — Dominik Szoboszlai said Liverpool lacked “fighting spirit” in their 4-0 defeat to Manchester City in the FA Cup and said it is “hard to find the words” to sum up his team’s poor performance.

Arne Slot’s side started well at the Etihad but conceded four goals in the space of 20 minutes either side of halftime. It is not the first time this season the Reds have wilted in the face of adversity, having won just two of the 19 games in which they have fallen behind.

It was the heaviest defeat of Arne Slot’s time in charge and Liverpool’s largest margin of defeat since October 2020.

“When you do something and there is no result for it, it makes no sense,” Szoboszlai told TNT Sports.

“We had chances and missed them; we conceded an easy penalty. We lose 4-0. We cannot concede as much as we concede. Nothing else to say.

“It’s hard to win here. After 1-0 down you still believe. At 2-0 down, it’s our own fault to come in at half-time conceding in the last minute another goal. At 2-0 the chances are lower and lower. You come out and want to show we are able to come back and you concede a third one, from then on there is no more chance to come back.

“The fighting spirit wasn’t there enough, the mentality wasn’t there enough. None of us were there to be honest as much as we could. It’s a hard time but we have to stick together. On Wednesday there is another chance but we have to get in our head this is not the season we would like to end.”

Asked why Liverpool were lacking the necessary fight to challenge City, Szoboszlai said: “That’s a good question. I don’t know. It’s hard to find words to be honest. We wanted this one so much. You lose 4-0 at City and it’s not the best.

“We have to forget as much as we can and as soon as we can and just keep on fighting all the time. I always say when we do it and we are winning, when we don’t do it we are losing. You have to fight, work hard, be there for each other and that’s what we are missing sometimes.”

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Szoboszlai’s comments were later put to Slot.

“I should ask him what he means and what period of time,” Slot said. “If he felt it was the whole game, I did not feel this until the moment they scored [to make it] 1-0.

“In that 10, 15 minutes of time [at the start of the second half],” he added, “I missed the fighting spirit … the willingness to win your duel, to be there first, to make it difficult for either a pass or a cross or a finish. That is something we definitely have to do better on Wednesday [against PSG].”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The UConn Huskies men’s basketball team is one win away from reaching their third national championship in the last four years.

The Huskies got to the Final Four after a stunning Elite Eight win over the Duke Blue Devils when Braylon Mullins nailed a long 3-pointer to give them the lead right before the final buzzer. Duke reached the game with a victory over the St. John’s Red Storm.

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Dan Hurley’s wife, Andrea, weighed in on St. John’s fans seemingly rooting against the Huskies as they took on the Michigan State Spartans in the other Sweet 16 matchup on that side of the bracket. It appeared the rivalry between the two schools is alive and well.

“OK, I’m gonna say it. St. John’s fans … When we went to the game, all those St. John’s fans were rooting against us,” Andrea Hurley said on “The Field of 68: After Dark.” “And that just broke my heart. … It’s really sad. … That’s crappy … That was crappy.”

2026 NCAA MEN’S TOURNAMENT: LAST TIME FINAL FOUR TEAMS MADE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP

UConn head coach Dan Hurley talks with a referee during the first half of the Elite Eight NCAA tournament game against Duke in Washington on March 29, 2026. (Stephanie Scarbrough/AP)

Hurley said she was talking to Rick Pitino’s wife during the Big East Championship and asked her how she did it, seemingly forming a bond with the family over the rival school.She added that she may not have wanted to see the Red Storm in the tournament, but didn’t necessarily want to face the Blue Devils either.

Dan Hurley had praise for his wife earlier in the week after he said she was able to keep players from storming the court after Mullins’ shot went in against Duke. UConn may have received a technical foul for going on the court too early, which may have presented a different conversation from the media going into Final Four.

UConn head coach Dan Hurley speaks during a news conference ahead of the national semifinal NCAA college basketball tournament game against Illinois at the Final Four in Indianapolis on April 2, 2026. (Abbie Parr/AP)

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UConn will take on Illinois in their Final Four matchup. The winner will either play Arizona or Michigan.

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