<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\n\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the whole, far less attention is paid to women's team sports than to women's individual sports. The most recognized female stars are invariably tennis players, swimmers, skiers -- whereas most popular male heroes are team players. After all, these guys are on our teams. They're playing for us. Women's teams have never enjoyed that sense of the possessive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;And it's not so simple as the old glass-ceiling analogy. No, it's more emotional: teams represent our city, our college. They represent us -- the old team spirit. So, for many gentlemen, having a team of girls representing us is too much to bear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;And to be frank, female fans have themselves miserably failed their sisters; they've not yet come to support women's teams as men do their own athletes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oh, there was that feel-good moment in the summer of '99 when our American women won the soccer World Cup. But an attempt at a women's pro soccer league quickly collapsed, and a new one barely survives. Women's pro basketball is humored -- forced to play in the offseason, the summer, so the desperate arenas can at least open the concession stands .&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In college, women's softball, volleyball, ice hockey are tolerated mostly just as necessary evils -- fill up the Title IX quota. They sure don't fill up the stands. Watch your local six o'clock news. How often does the sports guy even make a reference to a women's team game? Sure, Serena and Venus get mentioned during the Grand Slams, the be-sequined figure-skater dolls every four years at the Olympics, maybe Michelle Wie if she's in contention this weekend ... but women's teams?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;That's why the University of Connecticut's basketball team and its 87 consecutive victories mean so much. The streak places a spotlight on all of women's basketball. The Huskies force people -- men and women alike -- to at least think about women's teams. The idea. Little girls see UConn and they realize they don't have to pick up a tennis racket or a pair of figure skates. By being so good, UConn has not just transcended its sport, but it's doing a number on tradition. On sexism, too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;And, well, as for numbers, the Huskies can, within a week, pass the incredible record of 88 wins in a row set by the UCLA men back in the 1970s. Whether the Huskies break that record or not -- and they're not so very good this year that they couldn't come a cropper against Ohio State this Sunday -- they sure have made people notice them. By its success, UConn could be rather to women's basketball what the Baltimore Colts-New York Giants overtime game in 1958 was to the NFL. After that, fans stayed tuned to pro football. They bought tickets.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a crowded world of images, you need the extreme to upset the accepted, you need a phenomenon to change the everyday.&lt;/p&gt;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.si.com/more-sports/2010/12/15/uconn-streak>