History in the making

CLEVELAND -- Twenty years ago, Tennessee crushed Louisiana Tech to win its first NCAA women's basketball championship. This past winter, some members from that team showed up in the Lady Vols' locker room, shared their championship stories, joked about coach Pat Summitt, and basically challenged this year's team to do what they did.

Candace Parker soaked it all in. She wants nothing more. She came to Tennessee to win a championship, and she and the Lady Vols can do just that with a victory tonight over Rutgers in the NCAA title game. It would be the seventh for the Tennessee program, but the first since 1998. That's a dry spell that borders on biblical in Knoxville, and Parker, the sophomore All-Everything forward, can stake her claim among the Tennessee greats by following in the very large footsteps of Bridgette Gordon, Chamique Holdsclaw, and Tamika Catchings.

"That is the standard at Tennessee," said Parker, the Player of the Year. "When Coach Summitt recruited me, she told me that our [recruiting] class was capable of cutting down nets. I want my legacy to be that we hung banners during my career. All the greats at Tennessee hung banners."

Parker may well end up the best of the bunch by the time she leaves Rocky Top. At 6 feet 4 inches, she can play all five positions. She can shoot from the inside or the outside. She rebounds. She blocks shots. She dunks (six times, according to the Tennessee media folks). This is only her second season on the court (she redshirted as a freshman, the first time that has happened at Tennessee) and her first Final Four experience.

Parker and teammates clamped down on North Carolina in the final eight minutes Sunday night to earn a berth in tonight's game. It wasn't her finest outing; she missed nine of the 12 shots she took and was in foul trouble in the first half.

As good as she is, she is not above learning from these things. She did other things. She collected 13 rebounds. She made eight of nine free throws. She blocked a shot and had three steals. She had learned from a bad game in the SEC tournament loss to LSU that "there's other things that I'm capable of doing. And I feel like I'm thankful that I learned my lesson previous to the NCAA Tournament."

One would think that she would have known that for some time, for she has been a prodigy with a capital P since eighth grade. By the time she was playing at Naperville (Ill.) Central High School, recruiters were slobbering all over her. She won back-to-back USA Today Player of the Year awards. She was a McDonald's All-American. If there was an honor to win, she won it.

Her choice of Tennessee was sort of like the Saudis discovering diamond mines under their oil reserves. Said Summitt, "When Candace Parker said, 'I'm going to Tennessee,' I felt like we got a different situation now just because of what I had anticipated she would bring."

Who knows what would have happened had Parker (as well as a few others) not been hurt in 2004-05? Last year, Tennessee got to the Elite Eight but was sent home by North Carolina. It was, Summitt said, a "defining loss" for the Lady Vols.

"I think they realized how much they needed each other," Summitt said. "And then, in the offseason, they went to work. And I think that they respected Candace at a different level because Candace changed her work ethic."

Did she ever. She averaged 19.7 points, 9.9 rebounds, and nearly 3 blocks a game. She missed one game (a respiratory illness). She was the SEC Player of the Year, an All-American, had 21 double-doubles -- and she knows it means squat if she can't lead her team to a victory tonight because the bar is set so impossibly high at Tennessee.

Asked yesterday how she would be remembered if Tennessee did not win a title while she was there, she said, unhesitatingly, "I feel like I'll be remembered differently [than the winners] and I feel like my team will, too. That's the standard at Tennessee."

That is music to Summitt's ears.

"If I had to say today who has been the player that's had the greatest impact on championships, it's Chamique Holdsclaw," she said of the star of her 1996-98 title teams. "Candace knows that and understands that. She said, 'Don't talk about Candace Parker along with Chamique until Candace Parker's a part of a national championship.'

"I think that that speaks volumes for who she is, and she's willing to put it on the line and right or wrong, that's how people will most likely define her career."

Parker already is looking ahead to 2027, when she and Alexis Hornbuckle and Nicky Anosike and the rest can walk into the Tennessee locker room and tell that team what it takes to win it all.

"We want to be able to come back and have our banner in the rafters and be able to celebrate and tell famous Pat stories and things like that," she said. Turning to Summit, she said, "and roll her in a wheelchair."

Peter May can be reached at P_May@globe.com.