Instead, she had waited all this interminable day just to spend two mostly wretched hours watching the Sooners look nothing like their Big 12 regular-season champion selves.

It appeared as if they'd been the ones consuming that artery-killing catastrophe for lunch. They were lethargic and uninspired, two things you almost never see with Coale's Sooners.

Stacey Dales' finger-roll try in the second half -- normally an automatic move for her -- summed up OU's night. She was some six inches shy of the basket. It was like Greg Maddux missing the strike zone by 2 feet.

Yes, it was a late start -- 9:30 in Spokane but 11:30 to a Central-time body clock -- but no coach will ever cite that as a legitimate reason for tired play. At least not publicly. Even though they all know that often, the longer kids have to sit around before a game, the worse they play. Sometimes players have their best games the day they are fighting a cold, must take two tests and have a term paper due. But give them all day to just pass time, and rather than being well-rested by tipoff, they're somnambulists.

And there's not much a coach can do about it. Sometimes you prepare well, and your team is still flatter than that pathetic little bit of soda always left in the 2-liter bottle in the back of the fridge. That was the Sooners on March 24. And Coale had the entire spring, summer and fall to think about it.

"It doesn't go away," Coale said. "I wouldn't say it crosses my mind every day. But I can remember significant losses much more than significant wins."

Flash back four years to Coale standing in the hallway of Kansas' Allen Fieldhouse, watching the Jayhawks celebrating after they had beaten Oklahoma to clinch the Big 12 regular-season title.

That day, there was a perfectly legitimate reason for the Sooners to get squashed; they weren't very good and KU was. Still, Coale -- in her first season at OU -- was irate. She said her kids needed to work over the summer to become real Division I players. Or else get kicked around the same way the next season.

Sometimes you talk to coaches who are trying to change the entire mindset and fortune of a program, and you think, "Do they really believe all this stuff they're saying?"

But there are others of whom you think, "I don't know if they'll actually pull it off or not, but they have a chance because they do believe it."

	Coach Gail Goestenkors is in her 10th season at Duke.

Coale was one of the latter. So was Gail Goestenkors of Duke, the school that is host for this Tipoff Classic and faces Texas Tech on Sunday.

Both Coale and Goestenkors spent their first season in last place in their conference. With that almost nine years in her rearview mirror, Goestenkors can sort of chuckle.

"We were picked last, and we finished last," she said. "We did attain all of our goals, I guess you could say."

Coale and Goestenkors don't have the same personality, but do have a lot of similarities that are key in how they've taken programs that were going nowhere and made them national-title contenders.

When you describe successful coaches, you end up sounding like them. Saying hard work, intensity, competitive drive, vision -- that stuff that makes for mind-numbing quotes that stop your stories dead. Still, those things are imperative, and Coale and Goestenkors have them. But maybe the most important trait they share is an ability to size up other people.

Not their basketball or athletic talent. A lot of folks can do that; it's mostly visual. Rather, what kind of person a player is -- to do that takes more a combination of instincts and empathy. Such as: "She's spoiled rotten, but she's smart and too proud to fail. ... That girl will never grow up, or at least not in the four years I'd have with her. ... This kid needs to hear someone say they care about her."

You could put Coale and Goestenkors in a room with 10 people they didn't know, and in an hour, they'd come out with an accurate assessment of all 10.

That's why they can recruit. And why both have had one particular kid who has ended up being the biggest timber in their construction projects as much because of her character as her hoops talent.

For Duke, it was Georgia Schweitzer, who finished her career last season. For Oklahoma, it's Stacey Dales, a senior All-American this season.

Duke is right on the verge -- if not already there -- of being able to recruit against anybody. Schweitzer's four years, but most especially her 1999 NCAA Tournament, are part of the reason why.

The Sooners are not yet in that recruiting stratosphere, but the success that Dales-led teams have had certainly changed Oklahoma's credentials.

"She's the poster child for our program," Coale said. "She's the one we've built this thing on. She's quite an ambassador: articulate, bright, funny -- just the total package.

"The weight will be on her shoulders, she knows that and she expects that. She's special, and we'll all know just how special when she's not on the court after this year. We're going to try to enjoy every minute of this season."

So don't take Coale's earlier comment -- about losses sticking with her more than wins -- as indication she's chronically unhappy. March 24 isn't really the only day she remembers from last season.

"I think we all owe it to ourselves to enjoy the good," she said, "and sometimes we don't do that and have to remind ourselves about it."

Mechelle Voepel of the Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached at mvoepel@kcstar.com.