By Chuck Schoffner
The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS - Pam Borton could see it in their faces, she could sense it in how they talked.

Her predecessor as women's basketball coach at Minnesota had bolted after nine months on the job, leaving behind players who felt they had been abandoned - jilted just as they were starting to win.

So Borton went to work building trust and out of that, just two years later, has come the most successful season in school history and a Final Four date tonight against UConn.

How's that for working fast?

"Right when she got hired, she came out and had dinner with all of us and just got to know us as people before we were really basketball players," senior guard Lindsay Whalen said. "That's something that really caught a lot of our eyes and a lot of our attention."

Borton believed that was critical.

She had been an assistant at Boston College for five years when she was hired to replace Brenda Oldfield in May 2002. Oldfield was chosen as the national coach of the year after engineering a major turnaround with the Gophers but then left for a better paying job at Maryland, a school with more tradition in women's basketball.

Now here was Borton, the team's third coach in as many years.

"I just felt like it was my job for them to get to know me as a person, let them know that I care about them and I was going to be around," Borton said. "Sometimes it's not just about what they do on the floor. You've got to show them what you're going to do for them off the floor as well. And that was the most important thing that I did."

But just don't get the idea that this is some giddy, happy-to-be-here bunch. Oh, they're happy, all right. No one in the NCAA Tournament has played with more sheer joy and exuberance than the Gophers, who came out of the Mideast Regional as the No. 7 seed.

But they have one thing in mind: winning. The thing is, they're not playing just anyone.

UConn (29-4) is the first school to make five straight Final Four appearances and is trying to become the second to win three consecutive titles. Tennessee won three in a row from 1996-98.

The Huskies are the epitome of confidence and swagger, and rightly so. They have All-American Diana Taurasi, plus a strong supporting cast with Barbara Turner, Ann Strother, Jessica Moore and Maria Conlon. All were key figures in UConn's title run last year.

UConn has been through all of this. Minnesota hasn't.

"I don't know if it's an advantage," Taurasi said. "But I would rather have that experience than not have it."

Still, the Huskies know what they're up against.

"They're the best seventh seed in the history of college basketball because Lindsay Whalen got hurt and they lost a couple of games," UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. "Had she been healthy, they might have been a No. 1 or No. 2 seed. You don't know."