Darron Cummings / AP

Baylor's Sophia Young celebrates her team's victory. A final without Tennessee or UConn is tough to watch, writes columnist Filip Bondy.

The network, and college basketball, must look to Summitt for some quick resuscitation. For the moment, it appears Tennessee will have to carry that weight for the next two or three years, because UConn is likely a non-factor for the foreseeable future. Auriemma is suffering through his first recruiting slump in more than a decade. If you think you’ve seen the worst of his tantrums, then watch what happens in the next two seasons.

Meanwhile, the Baylor championship run was not without its redeeming value. Young, a kid from the West Indies who didn’t play basketball until she was 15, emerged as a real star. She comes back one more season to showcase her drop steps and slants.

And the victory was monumental for Kim Mulkey-Robertson, a legend at Louisiana Tech who left Ruston to breathe life into Baylor.

Lord knows, the Waco school needed an adventure like this, after the 2003 men’s basketball scandal, after the death of basketball player Patrick Dennehy and the charges leveled against his former teammate Carlton Dotson. The women vowed to create a new model program, to begin a much happier line of memories.

“Look up at these fans,” Mulkey-Robertson said, when it was over. “That’s how we change the Waco community.”

That was the theme all season from Mulkey-Robertson, and then her players went out and stuck to the game plan. The defenders boxed out. The jump shots fell.

Good for them. It was just a shame the Lady Bears didn’t face Tennessee, a team that knocked them out of this tournament last season on a disputed foul call with two-tenths of a second left.

That would have been a story line, an event. It never happened, though. Baylor is the champion without beating Geno, without knocking out Pat.

The school doesn’t get an asterisk for that. The title is certainly deserved.

But something was missing … something orange or blue, or any color but green.

That’s another thing we learned on Tuesday, when both Baylor and Michigan State came out on the court with practically the same warm-ups, the same color schemes:

Two greens do not necessarily equal money for the NCAA, or ESPN.

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