The News

 Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi and Breanna Stewart gathered at the UConn Huskies' team hotel following their alma mater's loss in the 2022 national championship game to South Carolina. The trio of UConn greats wanted to console the Huskies -- and Paige Bueckers.

The defeat was devastating, historic. It was UConn's first loss in a national title game after 11 previous wins, extending the school's championship drought another year. And yet, the alumni wanted to reassure Bueckers, then a sophomore, that heartbreak was all part of the process.

[The titles] never come without some really trying times," Bird recalls telling Bueckers and teammate Azzi Fudd. "Even if you go 39-0 in a season, it still wasn't perfect." Bueckers' tenure in Storrs, while undoubtedly impressive, has been far from perfect. Her freshman year was held in a bubble amid the COVID-19 pandemic. She missed more than half of her sophomore season and her entire junior year because of knee injuries, most consequentially tearing an ACL in summer 2022. She reached the Final Four three times before this year, and fell short in each instance.

But not this time. In her final game as a Husky, Bueckers earned that elusive national title. She scored 17 points and grabbed six rebounds in an 82-59 victory over defending champion South Carolina that secured the sole accolade missing from Bueckers' résumé and snapped UConn's nine-year title drought.

The past five years for Bueckers and UConn have been defined by their shared pursuit of that coveted championship, with the common thread of getting knocked down and needing to find their way back up.

"When you lose at UConn, it's like the world is ending," Stewart told ESPN. "[We knew] that they were going to get it. It took a little bit longer, but they got here today."

The path might have been circuitous. The process might have been trying. But the ending for Bueckers and UConn? It was as perfect as it gets.

"It's truly storybook," said Rebecca Lobo, who like Bueckers won her first and only national championship with UConn in her final career game. "For her and the journey that she's had, what she's been through, I think, too, it means so much because of all the trials and tribulations she's had along the way."

The entirety of that tumultuous and rewarding five-year journey was distilled in the 10-second hug Bueckers and coach Geno Auriemma shared on the sideline when she checked out of the game for the last time. It was the first time Auriemma had seen Bueckers cry, and he told her, "I love you." It was Auriemma who couldn't hold back tears later, calling this "one of the most emotional Final Fours and emotional national championships I've been a part of since that very first."

"[Bueckers'] journey," he said on ESPN's postgame show, "has been the most incredible for any kid I've had."

NEARLY SIX YEARS to the day before Bueckers cut down the nets in Amalie Arena, she was visiting Tampa as a junior in high school attending the 2019 Final Four for USA Basketball. It was just days after she'd announced her commitment to UConn, her dream school, where she envisioned winning championships and getting the Huskies back on top.

The pairing of Bueckers and UConn proved seamless. With a swagger to her game to pair with her on-court dominance, she took the college basketball world by storm as soon as she arrived in Storrs, becoming the first freshman to win multiple national player of the year awards. She propelled the Huskies to the Final Four, but even after they were upset by Arizona in the national semifinal, it seemed that time was on Bueckers' and UConn's side.

But the middle chapters of Bueckers' career taught her that nothing -- not time, not championship opportunities, not health -- could be taken for granted. She missed 19 games because of a tibial plateau fracture and meniscus tear as a sophomore, later admitting she forced her return too quickly. After tearing an ACL four months later, she sat her entire junior season.

Bueckers pushed through nearly two years of rehab, often masking her anguish. She completely altered her approach to the game and how she takes care of her body, prioritizing better nutrition, embracing Pilates and working with one of women's basketball's most renowned performance enhancement specialists. She leaned into her faith; she said that even if she didn't understand why this had happened to her, she believed there was a reason God handed her this obstacle.

Things went far from smoothly even once she returned to the court in November 2023. Last season took a toll on her as the Huskies confronted a new slew of season-ending injuries. By the postseason, Bueckers was playing some of the best basketball of her career, back better than ever from her ACL injury, but the happy-go-lucky player was nowhere to be seen, replaced by someone feeling so much weight that she'd wake up on game days just wanting them to be over.

"I was so worried about all that could go wrong," Bueckers said, "that you can't even do anything right," which all came to a head in the 2024 Final Four when the Huskies fell to Iowa by two.

This past season, Bueckers' fifth in the program, was different. With the help of a sports psychologist and Auriemma's continued guidance, she learned how to stay where her feet are. To not be so outcome-oriented. How to be more at peace with herself, to run her own race and to not let the pressure amid ever-heightening expectations become a burden.

In the leadup to Sunday, Bueckers wasn't consumed by the fear of losing. Well before she was even crowned a champion, Bueckers said she still wouldn't change a thing about her journey -- and in the end, it made Sunday's emotions all the stronger.

"You recognize the things that you've overcome to get to this point, and you feel like it's all been worth it," she said. "Just an overwhelming sense of gratitude for everything that's happened through the ups and downs. I wouldn't trade it for the world. And to be rewarded with something like this, you can't really even put it into words."

THE 12 NATIONAL championships Auriemma has won over 40 years of coaching don't alter his thinking: Winning is hard, and it requires so much to break your way.

For most of Bueckers' career, he believed that little worked in her favor. Her time in Storrs overlapped with the program's most snakebitten stretch in decades: Since Bueckers' sophomore year, UConn players have sustained 12 season-ending injuries. Bueckers and Fudd, who were recruited to be the most potent backcourt pairing in the country, appeared in just 17 games together prior to the 2024-25 campaign. It was a stretch Fudd described as having "bonded [the team] through trauma."

Even when the Huskies found themselves in the Final Four during Bueckers' sophomore and redshirt junior years, it wasn't with a group that Auriemma thought was healthy enough to have a real shot at winning it all. That's what bothers the coach most, he said this weekend, about how these past few seasons went. Because for as sensational as Bueckers had been, Auriemma has long maintained that she wouldn't be able to lift UConn to a championship -- and knock off the South Carolina juggernaut -- alone.

Finally, in her last season in Storrs, the stars aligned. For the first time in years, Auriemma believed UConn was playing at full strength. "We kind of have a chance to be able to manipulate the game a little bit better than we had before -- that's rewarding," he said Saturday. "That makes up for all the heartache and all the trauma and tribulations that we have had to go through."

Fudd enjoyed her healthiest season since arriving at UConn, playing twice as many games (34) as she had in the previous two seasons combined (17). Freshman Sarah Strong -- who announced her commitment to UConn one year ago Sunday -- surpassed even internal expectations, emerging as one of the best players in the country and a superstar in her own right.

The Bueckers-Fudd-Strong big three reminded Auriemma, as early as December, of some of his other championship cores: Rebecca Lobo, Kara Wolters and Nykesha Sales; Breanna Stewart, Morgan Tuck and Moriah Jefferson; Renee Montgomery, Maya Moore and Tina Charles.

The emergence of this UConn team -- which outside of Bueckers skews younger and inexperienced because of the team's injury spell -- was more of a slow burn, particularly after early losses to Notre Dame and USC (games in which Fudd was limited or unavailable) and a stunning February upset at Tennessee. But 10 days after looking like a shell of themselves in Knoxville, the Huskies showed their first real glimpse of what they could be, demolishing South Carolina by 29 points on Feb. 16 in Columbia -- an indication that they had changed, and a harbinger of what was to come.

"About two months ago, this team fell in love with each other," Auriemma told ESPN's Holly Rowe. "At first they would play, it was like, 'Yeah we like each other, we like each other a lot.' ... I think after the Tennessee game, they fell in love with each other, with the process, with ourselves as a group, and they started liking their coaches. I've never been happier than I've been the last couple of months coaching a team."

Playing with a new mindset, Bueckers saved some of her best performances for her final NCAA tournament, scoring 105 points across the second round, Sweet 16 and Elite Eight, the most points scored in any three-game stretch by a UConn player. She and the Huskies breezed through the tournament in such dominant fashion because of Auriemma's mastery at getting his teams to peak at the right time.

Everything was coming together with the makings of a fairytale ending. That's why, amid his usual nerves, Auriemma kept the faith.

"I don't think the basketball gods would take us all the way to the end [only for UConn to not win]," Auriemma said. "They've been really cruel with some of the kids on this team. They've suffered a lot of the things that could go wrong in their college careers as an athlete. ... So they weren't going to take us here and give us more heartbreak."

IT WAS 30 years ago Wednesday that the Huskies celebrated their first national championship by beating Tennessee in Minneapolis' Target Center. They thought they might get their full-circle moment back in 2022, when Bueckers, a Hopkins, Minnesota, product, returned to the state for her second Final Four. But it instead came three years later in the Sunshine State, when that Minnesota kid delivered the Huskies back to the mountaintop in her final collegiate basketball game, riding into the sunset a champion.

Auriemma tried to posit that Bueckers didn't need a championship to be considered one of the program's all-time greats, that her individual play and ability to lift all those around her elevated UConn to heights it wouldn't have achieved without her. People debated what her legacy would be without a ring. But now that's a moot point.

Sunday was her coronation. ESPN's "The Bird & Taurasi Show" displayed after the game a graphic listing Bueckers' collegiate accomplishments: three-time Big East player of the year, three-time unanimous first-team All-American, 2021 national player of the year.

"All those don't count," Taurasi said. "Only thing that counts is she has a national championship. She is a champion. She will forever be in the record books."

And she did it in her own way. After years of being pushed by Auriemma, even criticized by outsiders, to play more aggressively, she didn't take over the game, nor did she need to. Fudd and Strong dazzled with a combined 48 points, and the team played the UConn way. Bueckers is known for her selflessness as a teammate, so it was fitting that she could celebrate in the background as Fudd was presented the Most Outstanding Player trophy.

"It's destiny, and obviously I have a great faith, so I believe God planned it perfectly in the way that it went out," Bueckers said. "It's a great last showing of the great team basketball that we've been playing all season."

Bueckers was the last player to cut down a piece of the net, twirling it around as she let out a roar. She departed the court for the last time in her collegiate career, surrounded by a throng of screaming UConn fans and with the rest of the net around her neck -- enshrined as a national champion.

"There is something extremely validating about winning a championship. There is something about shutting people up when you win a championship," Bird said. "I'd imagine, just given the roller-coaster ride that has been her career in terms of the injuries, I think this would just be such a warm, fuzzy-feeling way to end everything."

Added Lobo: "When you get to the other side and look back, you realize sort of the perfection of it all. How many players end their career with a victory? Very few. It's just sort of the incredible culmination of everything, the exclamation mark on everything that you've done."

 The Beverly Hills Cop star recalled an interaction that he had with the legendary In the Heat of the Night actor in the new documentary Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Men in Hollywood.  "They were talking about doing Malcolm X," the Coming to America star explained. "Norman Jewison was putting it together. They were gonna use The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley. And they approached me about playing Alex Haley."

 

Murphy was still considering the offer when he crossed paths with Poitier. "Around that same time, I bumped into Sidney Poitier at something, and I asked him, 'Yeah, I'm thinking about playing Alex Haley!'" he remembered. "And Sidney Poitier said, 'You are not Denzel, and you are not Morgan. You are a breath of fresh air, and don't f--- with that!

Poitier was comparing Murphy to Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, who were both finding their footing as Hollywood leading men around the same time the Trading Places star burst onto the scene in the 1980s. "I didn't know if it was an insult or a compliment," Murphy said of Poitier's comment. "I was like, 'What?'"

Jewison ultimately cast Washington, with whom he'd worked on 1984's A Soldier's Story, as the legendary civil rights activist in Malcolm X before Spike Lee took over the project's directorial reins. Lee's film, which was released in 1992, did not include Haley as a character, but used his Autobiography as its primary source material.

Murphy later speculated on why Poitier viewed him as a different kind of movie star than Washington or Freeman. "I was in uncharted waters. For Sidney and all those guys, when I showed up, it was something kinda new," he explained. "They didn't have a reference for me, they couldn't give me advice, 'cause I was 20, 21 years old, and my audience was the mainstream — all of everywhere. My movies [were] all around the world, and they had never had that with a young Black person. So nobody could give me advice, really. Everything broke really big and really fast."

Murphy noted that another iconic entertainer did try to give him more career advice, however: James Brown. "He told me I should stop cursing," Murphy said, laughing. "He said, 'You wanna be in this business for a long time? Stop that cursing.'"

That wasn't Brown's only advice. "And he said, 'You think you got a million dollars?' I said, 'Yeah, I do,'" Murphy recalled. "He said, 'You ain't got no million dollars.' He said, 'If you do got a million dollars, you take it and you bury it in the woods.' I said, 'Why would I bury my money in the woods?' He said, 'Cause the government will take it from you, so bury it.' I was like, 'But can't the government take your land?' And he said, 'But they won't know where the money is.'"

"That's a true story," Murphy said. "That's the kind of advice I used to get. We didn't have a lot of elders."

 The Justice Department has placed on indefinite paid leave the attorney who argued on behalf of the government on Friday in a lawsuit brought by a Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador in error, sources familiar with the matter told.

Sources said Erez Reuveni, the acting deputy director for the Office of Immigration Litigation, was told by officials at the DOJ that he was being placed on leave over a “failure to zealously advocate” for the government’s interests.

At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement on Saturday. “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”

The government is seeking to appeal an order from the judge who presided over Friday’s hearing and ordered the department to facilitate the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia by Monday.

In Friday’s hearing, Reuveni repeatedly struggled when pressed by Judge Paula Xinis of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland for details surrounding Abrego Garcia’s deportation — and why the administration claimed it could not facilitate his return to the United States.

At one point in the hearing, Reuveni was asked by Xinis under what authority law enforcement officers seized Abrego Garcia.

Reuveni said he was frustrated that he did not have those answers.

“Your honor, my answer to a lot of these questions is going to be frustrating, and I’m also frustrated that I have no answers for you on a lot of these questions,” Reuveni said.

Universal Orlando’s new Epic Universe theme park is set to open on May 22. Spectrum News got a sneak peek of the highly-anticipated park, which includes five themed worlds: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter — Ministry of Magic, Super Nintendo World, How to Train Your Dragon — Isle of Berk, Dark Universe and Celestial Park.

 

The first and most important item to note about Epic Universe is its location to all the rest of Universal Orlando. The first two theme parks (Universal Studios Florida and Islands of Adventure), the water theme park (Volcano Bay), the original dining/shopping/entertainment district (CityWalk), and the first six hotels (Portofino Bay Hotel, Hard Rock Hotel, Royal Pacific Resort, Sapphire Falls Resort, Cabana Bay Beach Resort, and Aventura Hotel) are now the north campus; Epic Universe is the very beginning of the south campus, located about 15 minutes down the road. (There’s also a third piece of property, just 64 acres in size, that sits in between the two areas and houses the Endless Summer Resort hotel complex.)

Just to give you an idea of the size of these two chunks of Universal Orlando, the north campus is roughly 735 acres, whereas the newly acquired south district is approximately 750 acres (at least, that’s all that Universal has confirmed at the moment). The company has aided in rebuilding the main road leading to Epic Universe to include a center median, which, per Mark Woodbury at the Bank of America Media, Communications and Entertainment Conference, will be dedicated to a fleet of electric buses.

To give you a more exact idea of Epic Universe’s specific placement, it is south of Sand Lake Road and east of Universal Boulevard, as seen in the map above.

Epic Universe – layout

This will be the very first Universal park to adopt the traditional wheel-and-spoke design that was immediately popularized by Disneyland back in 1955, with a central hub being placed in the center and all of Epic Universe’s various individual lands radiating out from it.

Just because the concept is traditional doesn’t mean that Universal’s implementation of it will also be. As a quick look at the conceptual art attests to, the central hub of Celestial Park is massive, structured more like a long corridor than, say, the Cinderella Castle hub at the center of Magic Kingdom, leaving a ton of room for all sorts of experiences, entertainment, and, even, attractions.

Also unusual is the fact that the park’s four different realms are completely isolated from everything else, with the exception being Celestial Park, which connects them together. This was the approach pioneered by Universal for The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Diagon Alley, taken to the next level by Disney for both Pandora – The World of Avatar and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, and now fully deployed for the entirety of Epic Universe. Each themed area will feel as all-encompassing and immersive as Diagon Alley does, fully submerging you in one particular world or another.

Thanks to this level of immersion, guests will be fully immersed in the worlds of some of their favorite tales from The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Nintendo, How to Train Your Dragon, and Universal Monsters franchises.

Building on the success of the existing Wizarding World of Harry Potter areas in Universal Studios Florida and Islands of Adventure, Epic Universe will captivate guests with the magical side of 1920s Paris from the Fantastic Beasts films and the British Ministry of Magic from the Harry Potter series inside The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic.

Guests can expect to be transported into the heart of Nintendo’s video game realm within SUPER NINTENDO WORLD, complete with warp pipe travel. This much-anticipated world has already been captivating audiences in Universal Studios Japan since 2021 and Universal Studios Hollywood since 2023, giving us a glimpse of the expectations for Orlando’s own level-up. 

Inside How to Train Your Dragon – Isle of Berk, Vikings and dragons live alongside one another. This world brings to life the How to Train Your Dragon franchise with thrilling experiences that will capture the essence of dragon flight.

In the Dark Universe world, Universal Monsters aren’t just tales whispered in the night – they are a living, breathing part of this realm. Steeped in gothic ambiance, Dark Universe offers a multi-faceted exploration of Dr. Victoria Frankenstein’s experiments and their fables.

Epic Universe – history

The stretch of real estate that Epic Universe will soon be sitting on has a long and involved history with Universal – it was originally purchased by the company back in the 1990s for this exact same reason but was then sold off again due to various financial, commercial, and corporate reasons (including the revolving door that was Universal’s ownership at the time). We have the full scoop on this early period of what is today Universal Orlando’s south campus all laid out for you in our initial announcement.

But, of course, that complicated history doesn’t end there. Even after Universal had revealed the new theme park in August 2019, the coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020, which caused the company to readjust its plans – construction on the new plot of land was stopped altogether by July, and it wasn’t started back up until March 2021.

Although work started to recommence on March 3, 2021 (you can read the big announcement), the company cautioned that would still take several months to fully ramp back up to where it was at the beginning of 2020. Employees, vendors, and contractors – have to be rehired and their teams reassembled in order to proceed.

During the Comcast Corp at Bank of America Media, Communications and Entertainment Conference on September 14, 2023, Mark Woodbury divulged additional details regarding this exciting expansion to the Florida parks. “It’s the most technologically advanced park we’ve ever done,” Woodbury said. “And that speaks to both the attractions themselves, the next generation of robotics, drone technology, all the way through to the guest experience.” He mentioned that facial recognition will aid guests in a “frictionless experience” throughout all the Orlando properties. As part of Epic Universe, another 2,000 hotel rooms will be added, with Woodbury noting, “you’re going to see hotel integration into the park experience at a level that is really unprecedented.”

After years of development, Universal Orlando Resort officially announced the park’s opening date of May 22, 2025, in October 2024.