Their paths crossed more than 20 years ago, for one women's basketball season. Brenda Frese was hired to coach the Gophers in 2001, inheriting a team that had won one Big Ten Conference game the year before led by a freshman point guard named Lindsay Whalen.
In one year the Gophers went from 8-20 and in 10th place to 22-8 and in second.
And then Frese was gone, to Maryland.
Two years later Minnesota was in the Final Four. Two years after that, Maryland won the NCAA title.
Frese, still at Maryland, was talking Friday about the sudden end of Whalen's five-year tenure as Gophers coach.
Too soon, Frese said.
"I was disappointed in the timing of it,'' she said. "I've reached out to Lindsay. I've talked to her by text. Her and her staff, they've got a young core of kids in there right now, that freshman class. I thought she'd have a little more time to develop it.''
That was a common theme among coaches at the Big Ten tournament this week — too soon. That a first-time coach learning on the job through the rise of NIL, the arrival of the NCAA's transfer portal and the chilling effects of the COVID-19 pandemic deserved more time, the right to steer a strong freshman class into its sophomore year.