For one team, and especially one player, 2020 was about unfinished business. Of course, with the abrupt cancellation of March Madness, 2020 left unfinished business for everyone.

But first, that player and that team.

Sabrina Ionescu’s past year was movie material. It started with bringing Oregon to its first Final Four, where they lost to eventual champion Baylor. Then came the surprise announcement that she would play her senior season, putting a WNBA career on hold for one last chance to win a title. Ionescu called it “unfinished business.”

Oregon came into the preseason ranked first overall. They beat Team USA, faltered during a neutral site game against then-No. 8 Louisville, and dropped their first Pac-12 road game against Arizona State. Then, the unthinkable happened. A helicopter crash in LA claimed the lives of Kobe Bryant (a mentor to Ionescu), his daughter and seven others. Somehow, someway, Ionescu managed to play that night, and, when basketball mattered least, she led her team to a season sweep of rival Oregon State.

A month later, Ionescu became the only Division I player to ever record 2,000-points, 1,000 assists, and 1,000 rebounds in a career, only hours after speaking at the Kobe Bryant Memorial in Los Angeles. She played through the flu after flying from LA to Stanford, all while beating the Cardinal on their home court and notching her 26th (and final) career triple double, by far the most in collegiate history.

Storming through the Pac-12 tournament, Ionescu and Oregon confronted Stanford again in the championship, and a year after a heartbreaking loss, doubled down on their regular season conference title, throttling the Cardinal 89-56. Awaiting Oregon on the selection Monday that never came was another No. 1 seed and another opportunity for a Portland regional. Waiting forever, in New Orleans is the stage where Ionescu was supposed to be crowned, where she would finish her business, where the season she dedicated to Bryant was supposed to reach its pinnacle.

At least that’s the ending Hollywood would have written. Now, we’ll never know.

Senior Day salute for @Sabrina_i20
One step closer to finishing business...the winner stayed at @oregonwbb for a special season. pic.twitter.com/OBFJ3Hjnmx

— Holly Rowe (@sportsiren) March 2, 2020

This week, Ionescu was voted the unanimous AP player of the year. She was also a first-team All-American for the third straight year. Ionescu was joined by Ruthy Hebard on the first team and Satou Sabally on the second team. Both their stories deserve a pause.

Hebard finished second on Oregon’s career points list, first in career field goals made, and first in the conference’s all-time field goal percentage. Sabally, just a junior but forever linked to her contemporaries, announced she would forego her senior season to enter the WNBA draft after back-to-back All-American campaigns.

Ionescu will be drafted first into the WNBA (even if it’s not the scheduled April 17 date). Hebard and Sabally will follow in the picks soon after.

But what about the Gamecocks?

Across the country, there’s a team that doesn’t think Oregon was destined for that Hollywood ending anyway.

South Carolina, after all, ended the season ranked atop the AP poll, with 26 first place votes to Oregon’s four. They were the real deal. According to FiveThirtyEight’s model, South Carolina was the only team besides Oregon that was more likely to reach the championship game than not. The two teams combined for a 63-3 record this season, and the Gamecocks had one fewer loss.

Their seniors, Tyasha Harris and Mikiah Herbert Harrigan, were denied the opportunity to end their college career the same way it started — with a national championship. Their outstanding freshmen, Aliyah Boston, Zia Cooke and Brea Beal, will not have the chance to start their own path in a similar fashion.

And this would have been a meeting for the ages.

The first time the Final Four was hosted in New Orleans, the championship game itself went to overtime for the first time in its history. Fans across the country might have been in for an equally thrilling ending had Oregon’s big three and South Carolina’s standout trio of freshmen collided in the Big Easy.

Then again, they don’t call it March Madness for nothing, and it’s likely the games we can’t even imagine that are ultimately the biggest loss, the tournament matchups between Cinderellas and powerhouses that define this time of the year. The chaotic poetry of March Madness is unlike anything else precisely because it can’t be predicted.

History on pause: who’s grateful, who’s not

Notre Dame, which was likely going to miss the tournament, is able to maintain its 24-year streak. UConn, which had reached the Final Four every year since 2008, had its run snapped. (Or was it?)

Baylor was seeking to become the fourth program to ever win back-to-back titles, joining UConn, Tennessee, and USC. Now the Lady Bears will need to wait a year for another opportunity. Only this time, Baylor will be without Lauren Cox, who injured her knee during the championship last year but played the entire 2019-20 season and was named the Big 12 Player of the Year as well as a first-team All-American.

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Conferences will also have to wait a year to make their case. The top heavy Pac-12 was fitted to have five teams seeded in the top sixteen. The Big Ten was supposed to send more teams to the NCAA tournament than any other league. And Charlie Creme’s bracketology for ESPN had seven teams from mid-major conferences earning single-digit seeds.

UConn and Stanford, two of the sport’s preeminent programs, each had a special moment on the line. UConn could have sent its senior class off with its first national title, saving the group from becoming the first since the 2004 recruiting class to leave Gampel Pavilion without a ring.

Stanford head coach Tara VanDerveer could have matched the legendary Pat Summitt’s career wins mark of 1,098 with an upset to reach the Final Four. Instead, VanDerveer (and UConn’s Geno Auriemma, who is three wins behind VanDerveer) will likely achieve the feat in an early season game next year with much less on the table.

Both coaches, however, will have another shot. The graduating seniors, on the other hand, will not.

March sadness, indeed.

Longtime USWNT fixture Carli Lloyd took to Instagram Wednesday morning to announce that she’s pregnant with her first child. 

"Baby Hollins coming in October 2024!" she wrote. The caption framed a collaged image of baby clothes, an ultrasound photo, and syringes indicating what she described as a "rollercoaster" fertility journey.

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In a Women’s Health story published in tandem with Lloyd’s post, the Fox Sports analyst and correspondent opened up about her struggles with infertility and the lengthy IVF treatments she kept hidden from the public eye.

"Soccer taught me how to work hard, persevere, be resilient, and never give up. I would do whatever it took to prepare, and usually when I prepared, I got results," Lloyd told Women’s Health’s Amanda Lucci. "But I found out that I didn’t know much about this world. I was very naive to think that we wouldn’t have any issues getting pregnant. And so it began."

Lloyd went on to discuss her road to pregnancy in great detail, sharing the highs and lows of the process and expressing gratitude for the care and support her family and medical team provided along the way. She rounded out the piece with a nod toward others navigating the same challenges, encouraging people to share their own pregnancy journeys, painful as they may be.

"My story is currently a happy one, but I know there are other women who are facing challenges in their pregnancy journey. I see you and I understand your pain," she said. "My hope is that more and more women will speak up about this topic, because their stories helped me. I also wish for more resources, funding, and education around fertility treatments. There is much to be done, and I hope I can play a role in helping."

The 41-year-old New Jersey native retired from professional soccer in 2021, closing out her decorated career with 316 international appearances, the second-most in USWNT history, in addition to 134 international goals. A legend on the field, Lloyd walked away from the game with two World Cups, two Olympic gold medals, and two FIFA Player of the Year awards.

On Tuesday, FIFPRO announced the launch of Project ACL, a three-year research initiative designed to address a steep uptick in ACL injuries across women's professional football.

Project ACL is a joint venture between FIFPRO, England’s Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), Nike, and Leeds Beckett University. While the central case study will focus on England’s top-flight Women's Super League, the findings will be distributed around the world.

ACL tears are between two- and six-times more likely to occur in women footballers than men, according to The Guardian. And with both domestic and international programming on the rise for the women’s game, we’ve seen some of the sport's biggest names moved to the season-ending injury list with ACL-related knocks.

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Soccer superstars like Vivianne Miedema, Beth Mead, Catarina Macario, Marta, and England captain Leah Williamson have all struggled with their ACLs in recent years, though all have since returned to the field. In January, Chelsea and Australia forward Sam Kerr was herself sidelined with the injury, kicking off a year of similar cases across women’s professional leagues. And just yesterday, the Spirit announced defender Anna Heilferty would miss the rest of the NWSL season with a torn ACL. The news comes less than two weeks after Bay FC captain Alex Loera went down with the same injury. 

Project ACL will closely study players in the WSL, monitoring travel, training, and recovery practices to look for trends that could be used to prevent the injury in the future. Availability of sports science and medical resources within individual clubs will be taken into account throughout the process.

ACL injuries in women's football have long outpaced the same injury in the men's game, but resources for specialized prevention and treatment still lag behind. Investment in achieving a deeper, more specialized understanding of the problem should hopefully alleviate the issue both on and off the field.

With recent transfers Talia von Oelhoffen and Kiki Iriafen joining first-team All-American JuJu Watkins and the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class at USC next season, the Trojans look to transition from an up-and-coming squad to a legitimate title contender. 

Former Oregon State graduate student von Oelhoffen is the latest collegiate talent to commit to the program, announcing her transfer Monday via ESPN. She follows ex-Stanford leading-scorer Iriafen in the jump to the pair’s one-time Pac-12 rival.

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The 5-foot-11 Washington native was a two-time All-Pac-12 guard during her time at Oregon State. But after the recent dissolution of the Pac-12, the Corvallis side found themselves without a permanent home conference going forward. Many big name players opted to take their skill elsewhere as a result, with von Oelhoffen’s fellow ex-Beaver Raegan Beers announcing her own departure to Oklahoma on Monday.

According to DraftKings, USC is now tied with UConn for the second-best betting odds to win the 2025 NCAA women’s tournament. Dawn Staley’s tested South Carolina side, poised for a repeat performance, holds down the number one spot.

Last year, LSU loaded up in the transfer portal after beating Iowa to win the 2023 national championship. The Tigers were clear favorites coming into the 2023-24 season, but were bounced in the Elite Eight by Caitlin Clark’s Hawkeyes. Shortly thereafter, star transfer Hailey Van Lith opted to transfer a second time, this time signing with TCU. 

Yet while history proves that an excess of star power doesn’t always translate to on-court chemistry, on paper, USC sure looks ready to hold their own — in 2025 and beyond.

The United States and Mexico have withdrawn their joint bid to host the 2027 Women’s World Cup, per a Monday afternoon release from U.S. Soccer and the Mexican Football Federation.

According to the statement, they will instead focus on developing a "more equitable" bid for the 2031 tournament, with the ultimate goal of "eliminating investment disparities" between the men’s and women’s tournaments.

The federations went on to cite the upcoming 2026 Men’s World Cup in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico as an opportunity to build support for local infrastructure, improve audience engagement, and scale up media and partnership deals in preparation to "host a record-breaking tournament in 2031."

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"Hosting a World Cup tournament is a huge undertaking — and having additional time to prepare allows us to maximize its impact across the globe," said U.S. Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone. "Shifting our bid will enable us to host a record-breaking Women’s World Cup in 2031 that will help to grow and raise the level of the women’s game both here at home as well as across the globe."

The decision leaves just Brazil and a joint bid from Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands in the running for the 2027 host spot. Brazil — the rumored frontrunner — has never hosted a Women’s World Cup, while Germany hosted the 2011 tournament as a solo venture. 

Furthermore, this postponement doesn’t mean the U.S. is a shoo-in for 2031, as it's been previously reported that 2022 UEFA Women's EURO host England is considering their own Women's World Cup bid. FIFA is scheduled to confirm the winning bid after the FIFA Congress votes on May 17th.