BE LIKE DEE.

The most identifiable profile in the state of Connecticut--big nose, big grin, long brown hair pulled back in a bun, which you can spot bouncing up the court from any seat in the Hartford Civic Center--belongs to Diana Taurasi, who plays basketball for the University of Connecticut Huskies. Since she joined the Huskies, three and a half years ago, the team has won a hundred and thirty games, two of them for the national championship, and lost only six. Last March, after she scored thirty-five points against the Texas Christian Lady Frogs in the N.C.A.A. tournament, UConn's head coach, Geno Auriemma, explained what set the Huskies apart: "We got Diana. And you don't."

Taurasi--Dee to her teammates--is built for basketball (six feet, a hundred and seventy pounds, with long arms for snatching rebounds and long, graceful fingers for feathering shots), and she excels at each of the game's usually incompatible specialties (pass, shoot, block, steal, rebound). She won last year's Naismith Award for the country's best female collegiate player; she ranks in the top ten in the Big East in eight of twelve statistical categories. But what makes her the best college basketball player ever, and the most sought-after prospect in the seven-year history of the W.N.B.A., are two unmeasurable but highly marketable qualities: her playground joy in the game and her last-minute dominance. Nobody looks happier out there. Nobody is harder to beat.

That such a talent wound up in Connecticut is no accident. The team leads the nation in attendance; its entire schedule is televised, on the networks or on Connecticut Public Television; fifteen daily newspapers in the state cover nearly every game. After eighteen years on the job, Geno Auriemma is the highest-paid coach in women's college basketball, at more than six hundred thousand dollars a year, and the key figure in a sports program that the UConn president, Philip Austin, credited with bringing the university more than a billion dollars for capital improvement. The Connecticut state legislature passed the appropriation bill--the largest for any public university in the nation--just two months after the Huskies' first national championship, in 1995. This year, the team seems well positioned to win its third straight championship, even after two losses in January, to Duke and Notre Dame, exposed the team's overreliance on Taurasi.

It's in the close contests with the team's strongest rivals, like the University of Tennessee Lady Vols (which, with UConn, account for seven of the past nine national championships), that you see how good Taurasi really is. In her junior year, in a nationally televised matchup with the Lady Vols in January, 2003, with 6.9 seconds left and UConn behind, 56-53, Taurasi hit a three-point shot--running to her left and falling sideways--to send the game into overtime. Then she hit the game winner. Surprisingly, nobody really talks about those shots. Instead, they talk about the one that ended the first half. With four seconds to go, Taurasi caught the ball, bounced it twice, and knocked in a seventy-footer, arcing over three-quarters of the court. Usually, players faced with such a shot heave the ball in desperation; in the replays Taurasi's footwork looks a little more forceful than usual--a two-steps-and-lean sequence--but above the waist she simply squares up and takes her normal shot, arms high, ball sent off with a snap of the wrist in a classic "bye-bye, now" follow-through. The casual-looking shot sails through the basket without touching the rim. Over on the UConn bench, Auriemma keeps his hands on his hips, as if nothing had happened, but his associate head coach, Chris Dailey, shouts "Oh, my God!" and bursts out laughing.

When Taurasi decides to score, she does it so easily that you have to wonder why she doesn't score more. Her signature shot is the three-pointer. Everybody knows it's coming, but she can shoot it from so far behind the line--practically from Globetrotter range--that it still surprises people. Most three-point shooters are specialists, finicky smaller players who skulk at the edges of the play, waiting for the ball to bounce their way. For Taurasi, the long shot is just one option in her scoring attack. If a defender comes up to stop it, she's fast enough to slip past to a suddenly open spot for her bunny-kick midrange jumper; ...