First, it would mean dispatching Cardinals Coach Jeff Walz from the tournament. Walz was an assistant on Maryland Coach Brenda Frese's staff from 2002 to 2006, then was elevated to associate coach for one season before an acrimonious separation on his way to Louisville.
"It's not important to tomorrow's game," Frese said of the circumstances leading up to Walz's departure.
During the 2005-06 season, Walz was an influential component on Frese's staff when Maryland won the program's first and only national championship. The Terrapins forced overtime in the title game against Duke thanks to a last-second three-pointer by freshman point guard Kristi Toliver, who went around multiple screens before releasing the shot from the right wing.
A 2009 report suggested that the relationship between Frese and Walz became strained after Maryland won the title, and that Walz had drawn up that play. But several Maryland players from that team revealed in a YouTube video chronicling those final seconds that they went off script completely en route to determining the outcome.
In the video, guard-forward Marissa Coleman said she initially was supposed to receive the ball on a fade screen. Toliver, though, caught the inbounds pass, and to get open she veered around a second screen teammate Crystal Langhorne had set on her own.
In 2009, two seasons after leaving Maryland, Walz directed the third-seeded Cardinals to a 77-60 victory over the top-seeded Terrapins in an NCAA tournament region final in Raleigh, N.C., ending the illustrious college careers of Toliver and Coleman.
During that postgame news conference, Walz suggested the Terrapins' body language made it seem they perhaps were overlooking Louisville.
"Well, Coach Walz was wrong," Coleman said at the time when relayed that information.
In Walz's first game coaching in College Park since his departure, Louisville (23-9) beat No. 10 seed Michigan State, 67-55, on Saturday in the opening round of this season's tournament. Senior guard Becky Burke led the Cardinals with a game-high 14 points, and she's one of the few players remaining from the team that dispatched Maryland three years ago.
Burke and her teammates weren't about to give Maryland any fodder for its locker room, either, preferring instead to discuss the excitement of advancing to the Sweet 16 as inducement enough for them.
Walz, though, did provide a hint as to the state of his association with Frese, who is seeking to advance to her fourth Sweet 16.
"I haven't talked to her in probably four years," said Walz, who guided Louisville to the NCAA championship game in 2009. "We both have our own thing going on so there is really no contact there at all."
The sentiment among Maryland's staff is that the rift between Frese and Walz may be more relevant to supporters of the program. Indeed, many Terrapins fans apparently still harbor ill will and would like to witness nothing more than Louisville's departure.
"It felt like a betrayal," Mark Littman, a Silver Spring resident who has been attending Maryland games for roughly a decade, said of the loss to the Cardinals. "It felt like [Walz] knew the Maryland girls and knew how to get under the skin of Marissa and Kristi."
If the Louisville subplot weren't enough, Maryland's coaches and players still remember vividly their early exit from the tournament last season, when brash Georgetown, after declaring its Washington area supremacy in the days leading up to the game, marched into Comcast Center for a 79-57 romp to advance to the round of 16.
Maryland guard-forward Kim Rodgers, then a junior, was among the most despondent after that loss, and during some down time on Sunday before practice, she reflected on reaching this point for a second-round game complete with layers of intrigue again.
"I think for the seniors and the holdovers that were there for that 2009 game [against Louisville], there's a little bit deeper meaning," said Rodgers, who played 17 games in 2008-09 as a redshirt freshman. "Overall, these are two different teams. The landscape has changed. A lot of these kids, it's not like before where the old players had played for Coach Walz. Now nobody has. This is a whole new team with a whole new identity, and he has the same thing."
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