The Connecticut Sun's final game in Connecticut ended the way you'd want a 24-season run to end: a 95-81 win, a full building, and a team playing for nothing on the standings and everything else. The playoff bracket was already set without them. They went out up fourteen anyway.
I have covered enough lame-duck nights to know they usually go the other way. A team with nothing in front of it tends to play like it, the effort leaks out somewhere in the third quarter, and everybody files out quiet. Not this one. The reporting out of Uncasville describes celebration, not a wake, which is the harder thing to pull off and the better thing to remember.
Context, because it matters here more than the final score does. The Mohegan Tribe bought the Orlando Miracle and brought the franchise to Connecticut for the 2003 season, the first WNBA team owned by a Native American tribe, and Mohegan Sun Arena became one of the genuinely distinct rooms in the league. That room saw back-to-back Finals in 2004 and 2005. It saw another in 2019, and another in 2022. It never saw a championship banner go up. Four trips, four times home without it. Twenty-four seasons of very good and never quite.
checked the almanac: the franchise is headed to Houston, which is where the WNBA's first dynasty lived. The Comets won the league's first four titles, from 1997 through 2000, and then folded in 2008. Basketball has been gone from that city a long time. It is coming back, and it is arriving with somebody else's history in the moving truck.
What comes next is the part nobody has a clean answer to yet. A relocation reshuffles everything for the people in it: players, staff, the front office, the fans who drove to Uncasville for two decades and now have a team fourteen hundred miles away. I don't have the full roster and staffing picture in front of me, and I'm not going to guess at it. What I'm watching is who makes the move, who doesn't, and what the league does about Connecticut, which just proved on its last night that it still shows up.