In early April, three days after winning a national title for the University of Connecticut Huskies and closing out one of the most decorated careers in college-basketball history, Paige Bueckers is chilling out in a dressing room at The Tonight Show, where she’s scheduled to make a cameo with the championship trophy. Host Jimmy Fallon pops by, assuring her this is the “first of many” appearances. Captain Kirk Douglas, guitarist for house band the Roots, offers his congratulations as Bueckers saunters down the hallway in her college jersey and shorts to tape a bit. “This is the last time I’ll ever wear the UConn uniform,” she says, not entirely ruefully.

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She then puts on a rhinestone-adorned flannel shirt and baggy camo pants and appears on the stage to screams of approval. Bueckers (pronounced Beck-ers) is beaming when she returns backstage, having climbed the stairs through the audience, letting a lucky few tap the hefty hardware. “It was a little workout,” she says. “More than I’ve had the last couple of days.”

As much as any sports star on earth, Bueckers, 23, has earned her break from the athletic grind. The past few days have been a whirlwind: a celebration in a Tampa hotel after UConn’s walloping of South Carolina, the 2024 defending champions, in the title game, then back in Storrs, Conn., for a homecoming rally, followed by a Mary J. Blige concert in Hartford. Bueckers’ Fallon stop is one of a number of appearances in New York City, after which she’ll make a quick trip back to Storrs for a parade and then return to New York to officially become a pro. Her selection by the Dallas Wings as the first overall pick will surprise no one but come with another round of fanfare.

Exhaustion, it turns out, is the price of a dream come true. Bueckers joined UConn nearly five years ago, already a sports celebrity thanks to high school exploits elevated by the likes of TikTok and Overtime, a media company that specializes in showcasing highlights of teenage ballers. Her standout first season, in which she became the first freshman to be named college player of the year, and the NCAA’s decision that summer to finally allow athletes to capitalize on their name, image, and likeness (NIL) only expanded her reach. Companies like Nike, Uber, and Gatorade signed her to sponsorship deals (she’s the first Nike NIL athlete with her own player-edition sneaker). In 2024 she became an equity partner in Unrivaled, the startup 3-on-3 league founded by former UConn stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier that debuted during the current WNBA offseason, and she will play next season for more than $350,000, exceeding what she’ll make in the WNBA over her first four seasons. Before even suiting up for a single WNBA game, Bueckers, nicknamed Paige Buckets, has helped propel the explosive growth and popularity of women’s basketball.

But that only captures the high notes. Those who follow the women’s game know the cinematic narrative of Bueckers’ story: the freshman sensation who was sidelined by injuries only to come back to reclaim her glory. Bueckers entered the NCAA the same year as such superstars as Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, but had to sit out a chunk of her sophomore year as well as the entirety of what was supposed to be her junior year. So as her peers went pro, driving up WNBA viewership and excitement, Bueckers took advantage of her remaining eligibility and stayed at UConn, where this past college season centered on her quest to finally win a title. It is, after all, practically a birthright at a school that had won 11 championships since 1995 and boasts such legends as Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, and Maya Moore among its alums. Had the Huskies lost, Bueckers would have gone down in history as the first UConn all-time great to fall short of the ultimate prize.

“I don’t know if a player has felt more pressure to validate a collegiate career with a championship than Paige has,” says Wings executive vice president and general manager Curt Miller, Bueckers’ new boss. “How she navigated that and thrived through that was really, really special to witness.”

Now Bueckers will exit one pressure cooker and enter another, with minimal rest. The WNBA schedule punishes incoming rookies, especially those like Bueckers who make it to the last day of the NCAA tournament. Celebrate your championship, do media and appearances, get drafted, do more media and appearances, almost instantly report to training camp. Expectations have soared in Big D: Wings ticket prices skyrocketed after Bueckers’ selection. In this booming era for the WNBA, Bueckers’ rookie campaign—along with other intrigue, like defending WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson’s attempt to return the championship trophy to Las Vegas, and Clark’s sophomore year—will be among the biggest storylines of the season, which tips on May 16.

Bueckers delivered something last year’s WNBA Rookie of the Year, Clark, couldn’t: a college championship. So can she not only transform the Wings into a playoff team—as Clark did for the Indiana Fever in ’24—but also push Dallas closer to a title? This isn’t the WNBA of old, unspooling under the radar. All eyes are on Paige Buckets. Next woman up.

Bueckers, who hails from Hopkins, Minn., was an athletic tomboy. “There were some times where I would get made fun of because I dressed like a boy, or I only played with the boys. I didn’t play with stereotypical girlie things,” she says. “Sometimes it would bother me. But it never bothered me to a point where I wanted to change.” She tried other sports, like track and softball, as a kid. “She wouldn’t play volleyball because she wasn’t going to wear those tight tights,” says her dad Bob, a software developer.

Basketball, however, was an early favorite. When she was 6, Bob took his daughter to a Minnesota Lynx–Los Angeles Sparks game: Candace Parker was a rookie for the Sparks and would go on to win both Rookie of the Year and league MVP that 2008 season. “When I get to the league, I want to be her teammate,” Bueckers told her dad. (So close. Parker retired right before last season.)

After watching Bueckers play against older competition when she was in sixth grade, photojournalist Gary Knox sent out a tweet comparing her to Taurasi. “Remember the name: Paige Bueckers,” wrote Knox, whose 2013 missive went viral after UConn clinched its 2025 championship. “Best 6th grade G [guard] I’ve ever seen.”

“Believe it or not, the footwork you see now, the poise, the tight ballhandling on a rope, is what I saw back then,” says Knox. The official Merriam-Webster X account replied to his tweet with a link to “the definition of prescient.”

Videographers began lining the sidelines of her high school and Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) games, so they could record and cut her highlights. “At the time, it was only guys in the NBA, guys in college, guys in high school who were getting mixtapes,” says Bueckers. Outlets like Courtside Films, Overtime, SLAM, and Ballislife invested heavily in Bueckers. “They really placed a bet on me,” she says. In high school she was stunned to see her Instagram following move from the upper 9,000s to 10K. “You see the K next to your name and you’re just like, ‘Whoa, what is even happening?’” says Bueckers. She now has 2.5 million followers. That’s an M next to her name.

Crowds would linger after games, to get autographs and take pictures with her. “It’d be like, ‘The bus is leaving, Paige, so you’re going to have to get your own ride home,’” says Brian Cosgriff, Bueckers’ coach at Hopkins High School. In 2020, Cosgriff walked into a Foot Locker in Miami, and a stranger recognized his Hopkins High polo shirt. “Hey, that’s where Paige Buckets went,” the guy said to him.

Geno Auriemma, UConn’s Hall of Fame women’s basketball coach, first saw Bueckers before her ninth-grade season. “I just thought, ‘Man, she’s so frail,’” says Auriemma. Cosgriff had nicknamed her Olive Oyl, after the rail-thin Popeye character. “She’s having trouble breathing,” says Auriemma. “I’m like, ‘What’s the big deal about this kid?’” She was a bit under the weather; upon repeat viewing, he was plenty sold. “There isn’t a shot she doesn’t think she can make,” he says. “There’s not an opinion she doesn’t think she can have. This kid’s just a walking definition of confidence.”

Bueckers committed to UConn after her junior year of high school. While she scored 20 points per game as a freshman and broke the school’s record for assists in a freshman season, Auriemma thought she was being too selfless. Given her efficiency—she consistently shot north of 50% from the field and 40% from three-point range in college, which is incredible for a lead guard—he had a point. “I said, ‘You know, you’re torturing me,’” he says. “Let me give you some words that would never come out of a men’s basketball coach’s mouth to any of their players. Never uttered. ‘Yo, dude, you gotta shoot more.’”

Auriemma compares Bueckers to Dennis the Menace, a rascally young comic-strip character who debuted in the 1950s and a reference lost on Bueckers’ generation. “You know, charming, cute kid, means well, but just cannot help themselves,” he says. “They have to do something on the court, off the court, say something to let you know that there’s some mischief lurking in there.” Bueckers would take a defensive risk that would backfire, then go out and make a bunch of shots to make up for it.

UConn reached the Final Four in Bueckers’ first year but lost to Arizona in the semis. That summer of 2021, during her acceptance speech for Best Female College Athlete at the ESPY Awards, Bueckers went out of her way to shine a light on Black women “who don’t get the media coverage they deserve.” Bob and Bueckers’ mom, dental-equipment specialist Amy Fuller, divorced when she was 3, and Bueckers has a Black half -brother, who’s 12. Black women also had a big influence on her growing up.

Bueckers believes Black women remain undercovered. “It’s still an issue, every single day,” she says. “There’s not ever equal coverage.” While her on-court accomplishments speak for themselves, she thinks she has an advantage in the endorsement world. “There’s white privilege every single day that I see,” she says. “I feel like I’ve worked extremely hard, blessed by God. But I do think there’s more opportunities for me. I feel like even just marketability, people tend to favor white people, white males, white women. I think it should be equal opportunity. I feel like there is privilege to what I have, and to what all white people have. I recognize that, I want to counteract that with the way I go about my business.”

Bueckers missed nearly three months of her sophomore season because of a knee injury but came back before the NCAA tournament to help UConn reach the championship game, where the Huskies lost to South Carolina. In retrospect, Bueckers says rushing back from that injury did more harm than good. “I was just so dead set on returning, and I don’t think my body was necessarily ready for that.”

She spent that summer in Storrs, lifting weights and eating as much as she could to build up mass. Then, during a pickup game in August 2022, she tore her ACL in the same knee she’d hurt as a sophomore. Bueckers recalls the four days before surgery as a low point. “I was just in a really bad place,” she says. “It was almost like I was having an out-of-body experience, to where I didn’t believe it was happening to me. It was straight disbelief. Shock and hurt.” She would be out her whole junior season.

Without Bueckers, UConn failed to make the Final Four for the first time since 2007, but it was during that season that she found a new role for herself: giving motivational talks during games that earned her the moniker Coach P. “Something that was so incredible for me to see was how she handled her rehab process,” says UConn teammate and close friend Azzi Fudd. “She definitely did get down, but she never let anyone see that outside of a select few, in her own space. In public with the team, at the gym, she was always upbeat, making sure everyone else was good.” Bueckers, meanwhile, brought the same ferocity to her recovery that she brings to her game. “I had the mindset of, every single day conquered will be a day closer to me playing basketball,” says Bueckers.

She returned for the 2023–2024 season, which ended in crushing disappointment: a loss in the national semifinals to Iowa and Clark that was decided on a controversial foul call. “I’m still sick about that game,” says Bueckers. “The weeks after it, I just felt so disappointed, frustrated with how it ended. But then, like always, the motivation piece kicks in, where you don’t ever want to feel that feeling again.”

Bueckers started working with a sports psychologist last fall. “In the offseason, I let voices get in my head, where I need to be this aggressive, selfish player,” she says. “That was never going to work for me, that was never going to work for the team.” Three losses before the final stretch of this season—at Notre Dame and at home to USC in December, and at Tennessee in February—tested her. “I wasn’t the best leader at the beginning,” she says. “I still made excuses, still tried to find reasons why I didn’t do something.” Auriemma challenged her to change that behavior and be an even more vocal presence.

“We got more of a sense of urgency,” says sophomore UConn guard KK Arnold. “She always had her speeches before practice. And during practice we were always engaged, always paying attention, making sure we’re doing the little things that we’re supposed to do.”

Between the Tennessee loss and the national-championship matchup, UConn won 15 straight games by an average margin of 32.1 points. Bueckers’ chase for that elusive title was the chatter of March Madness. But during the tournament, Auriemma downplayed that narrative. “I walked in and said, ‘Hey guys, anybody know the phrase win one for the Gipper?’” says Auriemma. This not being 1940, he explained the basics. “I don’t believe in that crap,” he told them. “I said, ‘This isn’t about a crusade to land one for Paige. This is about trying to do something that’s really, really hard to do.’ And I said, ‘Paige, you don’t owe anybody anything. You’ve already given all the people here at Connecticut more than they bargained for. Way more.’”

Still, the night before the April 6 title game, Bueckers started crying while talking to her sports psychologist. “I just wanted to win it so bad,” she says. They discussed redirecting her anxiety toward winning each possession, to distract from the end goal: bringing the trophy back to UConn, which last won a championship in 2016. The team’s 82-59 victory the next day validated all the effort. “For her to battle through everything and come back stronger than ever,” says Arnold, “and be as big a leader as she was, it just makes it 10 times better.”

After WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert called her name as the No. 1 draft pick on April 14, Bueckers kept putting her hand over her heart. She did so after hugging her parents, Fudd, and Auriemma, and while watching Wings fans in Arlington, Texas, celebrate her selection. “You’re just, like, touching your heart,” ESPN’s Holly Rowe noted. So in an elevator on the way to a flood of interviews with outlets like New York magazine, Today, CBS Sports, and Vogue, I ask Bueckers about that gesture.

Turns out some nervous perspiration had frayed the adhesive holding her Louis Vuitton blazer in place, and she feared revealing too much in front of 1.25 million viewers. “I didn’t feel as trusting in the tape as when the night first started,” she says with a laugh. “I did not want a wardrobe malfunction, that’s for sure.” A league escort worked the phone to secure some double-sided tape, pronto.

Before the draft, Bueckers and her fellow soon-to-be pros walked the WNBA orange carpet. It was about 40 feet long, though a WNBA official said the league would have needed 100 feet to accommodate all the outlets requesting space. As Bueckers zipped around throughout the evening, she did her best to accommodate fans’ requests. “I’m never washing my hands again,” a young girl said, jumping up and down after a shake from Bueckers. A boy stood frozen as he witnessed Bueckers descending an escalator. “Oh my God, Paige Bueckers,” he said. “Can I get a picture?” Bueckers stopped for the snapshot.

Nike threw her a draft-night celebration, where some 150 of her friends and family danced late into the night. It was there, she tells me at a New York City restaurant a few days later, that it sank in: the UConn chapter of her career is over. “This has been one of the greatest two weeks of my life in terms of happiness and joy, but also, I’ll just be sitting in my room and start crying,” says Bueckers. “It’s tears of happiness, you’re so extremely grateful that it even happened. But you’re obviously sad that it’s ending.”

After going 10 days without touching a basketball, Bueckers would have to ramp up her workouts in preparation for the WNBA campaign. “Paige is going to have to make the adjustment,” says Miller. “The speed of the game, the rules of the game, the physicality, is all different. The veterans aren’t going to take it easy on the rookie. Paige is going to feel her rookie moment at some point. She will have to navigate the comparisons to the adjustment that Caitlin had. We’re all mindful and aware, but we’re going to be very supportive that this is Paige’s journey, and no one else’s journey.”

Bueckers takes those comparisons in stride. “That’s what the media cares about,” she says. “That’s what everybody who watches basketball cares about. I used to be bothered by it. But I’ve done so much work on myself and my approach. The ability to not run a race in comparison, to run my own race and worry about that. Caitlin’s a phenomenal player. We’re also completely different players.” Pitting the two most recent No. 1 draft picks against each other, Bueckers admits, “is good for the game. At the end of the day, I don’t think either of us really cares about it, because we’re just trying to be the best versions of ourselves.”

She’s ready for the North Texas heat. “I want to give everything I have to the organization, to the city,” says Bueckers. “I know Dallas is a sports city. I’m walking in there wanting to be a great leader, a great teammate, wanting to be a winner at all levels, wearing that jersey and representing that city with pride and a passion and joy for the game of basketball. I want to give to that community. I want to be invested in it. We’re all looking to do something special.”

That will all come soon enough. For now, Bueckers, clad in a national-championship sweatshirt, just wants to eat a double cheeseburger with her friends, who are waiting at a nearby table. As the sun sets on her championship celebration, she’ll steal a few last moments. Then Buckets will go back to work.