Time was good to the Lady Vols. They became the first team in the history of NCAA women's basketball to three-peat. The incoming freshmen were billed in the preseason as the greatest women's basketball recruiting class of all-time ... and lived up to it. Their star player, junior forward Chamique Holdsclaw, swept over a dozen Player of the Year honors.

And it's how they did it against one of the toughest schedules in the country that made the season ever so much more amazing. Tennessee led the nation in scoring with 88.8 ppg while holding the opposition to a paltry 58.7 ppg for a winning point differential of 30.1 ppg. This Lady Vol team won all 39 games, including 17 victories over ranked opponents, by an average margin of over 30 points per contest. No team in the history of women's hoops had ever won more games--and so convincingly.

By season's end, Tennessee had pushed its consecutive winning streak to 45 games dating back to its last loss on March 2, 1997. Game after game, the team with the modest approach to the season was rewriting women's basketball history. When asked how they did it, Coach Pat Summitt responded, "First of all, I think they believed they were the best team. Secondly, we never talked about a three-peat. We just talked about going out and doing what we needed to do."

After all, the nucleus of the team had finished the 1996-97 season as the Lady Vol squad who lost the most games (10) in a decade and produced a number of negative firsts, yet they still managed to capture the NCAA title in spite of themselves. They learned to assume nothing and to never take anything for granted. Their character-building baptism from the 1997 championship season would yield even greater dividends in 1998.

No one ever imagined on November 18, with the season-opening victory over Southeastern Conference foe Mississippi, 92-64, that the '98 Lady Vols would run the table. In this first game of the "Victory Tour" season, freshman reserve guard Semeka Randall broke the rookie scoring record with 24 points on the same night the "Three Meeks" were born. Over the course of the season, one of the Three Meeks would be the leading Lady Vol scorer in 37 of the 39 games.

In the end, championship month was once again the Lady Vols' own. As the media searched for new ways to describe the UT team and its perfect season, words and phrases like "merciless, flawless, mega-talents, without peer, best college team to step on an arena floor, anytime, anywhere" were used.