So much for the notion that the women’s tournament is predictable, predestined and pre-packaged. After two weeks of rather ordinary basketball, the brackets and expectations suddenly exploded in a single night on Sunday, leaving us with a championship game on Tuesday of …

Michigan State-Baylor?

Go figure. And now, just try to pick a winner between these two teams that have played their way at least a round beyond reasonable expectation. This so-called expert, shaken and humbled by the semifinals, will go with Baylor. But clearly, the old patterns aren’t holding anymore.

It’s a new world, with new rules, devoid of UConn blue and Tennessee orange, lacking the enormous roster depth and backcourt star power. Both these upstart teams are playing in their first-ever Final Four. Aura, mystique and institutional memory will have little or nothing to do with the outcome.

And both schools have everything to prove.

You pick your motivation with the Lady Bears of Baylor: personal, historical, or geographical. Baylor (32-3) has inspiration galore to beat Michigan State (33-3), to complete its crusade.

There is the school’s tragic scandal to overcome, a legacy that these women never deserved to inherit.

It is impossible to forget, to entirely disown, the death of basketball player Patrick Dennehy and the charges leveled against his former teammate Carlton Dotson. The women long ago vowed to create a new model program, to begin a new and much happier line of memories.

Then there is that absurd two-point defeat to Tennessee last season in a Sweet 16 tournament game, a tie with two-tenths of a second left. Jessika Stratton of Baylor was nailed with a foul after chasing a rebound with Tasha Butts. No harm, no foul. That was what everybody thought. But there was a shrill whistle. Butts hit both free throws. No overtime.

“It’s a call that goes down in the history of basketball,” says Kim Mulkey-Robertson, the Baylor coach and guiding light. “You can’t make it disappear.”

Baylor gets its overtime now, on Tuesday. Only it’s against the Spartans, not the Lady Vols.

You want more motivation for Baylor? No team from west of the Mississippi has won this tournament in the past dozen years. Baylor is supposed to be a track school, not a women’s basketball school. Mulkey-Robertson probably owned bigger dreams than the people who hired her five years ago.

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