After the national championship game, one takes a deep breath ... thinks about everything one has put off during basketball season (dentist, oil change, taxes, etc.) ... wonders who will be the No. 1 team next season (Duke? Tennessee? Texas Tech? UConn again?) ... and then maybe does something totally unrelated to hoops. (OK, mildly unrelated.)

	UConn and the Diana Taurasi Show will undoubtedly be near the top again in 2003.

In San Antonio, they sat there across the street from the Alamo: the Plaza Wax Museum and Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum. These are the kinds of places where I don't even ask what the admission price is. Doesn't matter. I'm all too willing to shell out whatever they want in order to look at all this cheesy stuff, maybe 80 percent of which I've already seen in some other city a few years back but am drawn to as if it were a big magnet and I were a little metal filing.

The wax museum has its real works of art (I kept staring at "Jessica Tandy's" hands, sure they were going to start moving) and its second-rate lumps of wax ("Fred Astaire" could have been my Uncle Fred).

Anyway, I went all the way through it and was pretty surprised, really, that some Connecticut fan hadn't already commissioned the 2002 national championship team wax exhibit. Har, har, har ...

Seriously, though, what UConn has done for women's hoops is very positive. Fans fill the buildings in Storrs and Hartford. They travel. They support the public television station that shows the team. They buy souvenirs. They've demanded and gotten much better local media coverage than any other team in the country.

Has it helped them a great deal to be geographically close to ESPN? Of course it has. But this a program that put a lot of resources behind women's hoops a long time ago. It's an investment that has paid off.

And what coach Geno Auriemma says is bluntly correct: If other teams get tired of UConn getting so much attention, then beat the Huskies.

If you say, "Well, Notre Dame did that last year, won the national championship and then nobody talked about them much this past season," you're right. But that's because the Irish didn't follow up one great team with another one. And that's because it's really hard to do that.

But UConn has done it. The 1998 and '99 UConn teams, affected by injury, were not "great" teams, but they were still pretty good. The 2000 and 2002 teams were spectacular.

Which brings us to looking at next season. Auriemma joked that his seniors were laughing because they knew there would be paybacks from other teams after they left. Maybe. Maybe not.

Another good recruiting class joins what many are already labeling the Diana Taurasi Show. But, also, Jessica Moore and Ashley Battle get to come out from the shadows to complement her.

Auriemma acknowledged that he didn't think Taurasi had a particularly good championship game against Oklahoma, but she still made the biggest basket -- the one with 1 minute, 31 seconds left that Stacey Dales fouled out on.

We'll see how Taurasi handles being the main threat. It seems completely in line with her personality, so it shouldn't be a big deal for her.

Yet most folks right now probably say they'll pick Tennessee or Duke as the top team next season. Tennessee's strong freshman class will be better as sophomores, and Ashley Robinson likely will be more comfortable if she has a healthy summer.

We suspect Tennessee's returning players might see tapes of their game vs. UConn and Oklahoma's game vs. UConn. And then compare and contrast the two tapes.

Duke's Alana Beard looked like she was ready to run through a few concrete walls after the loss to Oklahoma, and she'll come back for her junior year with laser vision on the national championship. The Blue Devils have their own superstar class coming in, including a strong post player in Mistie Bass.

Chantelle Anderson and Vanderbilt could be right near the top again, and expect Georgia to be closer to its typical status. Louisiana Tech, disappointed with a first-round loss in the NCAA Tournament, has fresh motivation.

If post player Plenette Pierson returns from a suspension to Texas Tech for her senior season, the Lady Raiders could be a good pick for the Final Four. Kansas State and Texas appear to be the other top Big 12 contenders. And despite losing four senior starters, Oklahoma isn't going to drop out of sight. However, the Sooner will look a lot different; they likely will be post-oriented.

Stanford has two more years of Nicole Powell and all that can be built around her. We'll see if the rest of the Pacific-10 can rebound from what was a rather lackluster season.

I hate to sound like the typical robot and say Penn State and Purdue again in the Big Ten, but both those teams have much going for them.

And nobody would be surprised to see UConn at the Final Four again, would they?

Obviously, all kinds of things will play out between now and the first tipoff next November, including some more prominent coaching hirings. Projections this early are really just for fun, something to do to make the time pass until the WNBA draft.

Now, unfortunately, it is time for the dentist, oil change, taxes, etc. ...

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