SOUTH BEND, Ind. (WDRB) — Notre Dame has a way of making you feel small.
The golden dome. The history. The banners. The faint sense that, somewhere behind the baselines, a leprechaun is keeping a ledger of your sins and turnovers.
And if you’ve watched Notre Dame women’s basketball this season, you know the first sin is always the same: You get careless with the ball.
You get casual for one second and suddenly Hannah Hidalgo is gone like your phone sliding off the roof of your car.. Notre Dame forces turnovers the way winter forces your hands into your pockets. It’s not a suggestion, it’s a lifestyle.
So No. 9-ranked Louisville walked into Purcell Pavilion on Thursday night and did the rudest thing you can do in somebody else’s house: They kept their shoes on.
They protected the ball like it was the last cup of coffee in the breakroom.
They turned Notre Dame’s chaos into something tidy and manageable. They limited themselves to eight turnovers — against a team that lives off your mistakes — and walked out of South Bend with a statement win, 79-66 over No. 23 Notre Dame, Louisville’s first win there since 2022.
It was Louisville's 10th win in a row and 13th in their past 14 games. In front of a crowd of 6,449, Notre Dame dropped its first home game of the season.
And the scary part for everyone else?
Louisville (17-3, 7-0) is still getting better.
Not better in the “we’ll say that in a press conference because it sounds responsible” way. Better in the “this team is clearly learning itself in real time” way. The kind of improvement you can feel possession by possession, mistake by mistake, adjustment by adjustment.
There is a mental toughness to this group, a basketball IQ, that wasn’t missing the past couple of seasons, but it at times forgot to get on the bus. This team gets a lead and builds on it. They get behind and don’t panic.
This was one of those games where the star on the other side did star things, and still lost anyway.
Hidalgo scored 24 points and fought like she was trying to drag the whole building along with her.
But Louisville didn’t let her turn the night into a one-woman jailbreak.
They put bodies in her path. They built what head coach Jeff Walz called “walls” around her — multiple Louisville jerseys waiting any time she drove downhill, like a human traffic jam. The goal wasn’t to stop her from making plays. It was to make her work for every one of them.
That’s what good teams do: they don’t panic when the best player does something great.
They just make sure nobody else gets comfortable. And nobody else did. Notre Dame, the top-shooting team in the ACC, shot 39 percent.
Outside of Hidalgo, Notre Dame’s offense came in small, manageable bursts. Louisville made the game feel like it was being played inside a funnel, narrow lanes, crowded airspace, no oxygen.
And while all that was happening, Louisville was calmly stacking points like a team that has figured out what it wants to be.
Reyna Scott keeps saving her best offense for Louisville’s biggest opponents, and she did it again: 20 points, three steals, aggressive, efficient, fearless. When Notre Dame threatened to make it loud, Scott made it quiet again.
Tajianna Roberts didn’t just score, she made shots that mattered, the kind that stop crowds from inhaling and turn runs into shrugs. She finished with 19 points and went 4-of-5 from three, but the bigger story might have been everything else: the rebound, the defense, the charge she took, the way she impacted the game even when she wasn’t shooting.
Mackenly Randolph played one of her best games, too: 10 points and a presence that felt bigger than the box score. The kind of game that looks like growth you can actually see.
And then there was Laura Ziegler, who went 1 for 7, scored two points, and still felt like she was everywhere. Eight rebounds. Three blocks. Always in the right place defensively.
You want to know how grown-up Louisville looked?
When Ziegler’s shot wasn’t falling, Louisville didn’t collapse into the old, familiar thing, the one where you miss shots and start playing frantic, like the rims are shrinking and the clock is speeding up.
It keeps jumping off the page with this team: Louisville doesn’t have to win one way.
They can win ugly. They can win clean. They can win with a star scoring 25, or win with their most dependable player scoring two. They can win with defense that feels like a clamp, six blocked shots, including a couple late that turned “interesting” into “over.”
Anaya Hardy, at 6-3, showed up one day and became a stopper. When she's fronting the post, there aren't many bigs who are going to get the ball.
And Louisville can win with the bench pouring into the game like a plague. That stat was almost comical: Louisville’s bench outscored Notre Dame’s bench 31-2.
That’s not a “nice contribution.” That’s a full-on hostile takeover.
It’s why Louisville is back to going onto the road against ranked league opponents and expecting to win – and doing it. Louisville led for 30 minutes of this game and saved its biggest punch for the end — holding their biggest lead, 16 points, in the final minute.
That’s what mature teams do in places like this. They don’t just survive the building. They finish in it.
Now here’s where the column turns into the part Louisville fans might want to frame and hang on the refrigerator:
This isn’t some high-dollar roster assembled with a blank check and a golf-cart ride through the transfer portal.
Notre Dame can spend. Notre Dame can recruit. Notre Dame can stockpile. Notre Dame can look like a five-star convention.
Louisville looks like something else. It looks like a team. A real one.
It looks like a group that has bought into its coach and is learning how to play through stress without playing scared.
And Walz is doing some of his best coaching right now, the usual drawing up plays, sure, but coaching behaviors. Coaching details. Coaching habits. Achieving the buy in then turning all the right dials. And he has enough players on this team that have spent time with him that the development is kicking in. A talented sophomore class is growing up.
You saw it in the way Louisville handled Hidalgo’s pressure without getting jittery. You saw it in the way they shared the ball, got people in good spots, and didn’t let the game speed them into mistakes.
And you really saw it in the one thing Notre Dame usually owns: The turnover column.
Eight turnovers in that building is like ordering a steak and having it actually come out exactly the way you asked. It just doesn’t happen.
But it did.
Because Louisville is growing. The older players are steady. The younger players are coming. And Walz’s message is landing.
They look like a team that isn’t anywhere near finished. And it shouldn’t be taken for granted, given the resources flying around some of the programs they’re competing with.
They’re not just rising. They’re learning how to stay up there.
Yeah, this was just one night in South Bend. But it also was another sign of things to come.
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