Duke, Waner ready for title rematch with Maryland

	Duke's Abby Waner is still haunted by her performance against Maryland in last year's title game, going 1-of-6 and missing a last-second three-point attempt. Bill Frakes/SI
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Duke sophomore guard Abby Waner hesitates to use the word redemption, but she knows that's one of the possibilities offered by Saturday's game between No. 3 Duke and No. 1 Maryland, a rematch of the 2006 NCAA title game that Maryland won 78-75 in overtime.

Waner missed a jumper in that game, which would have given Duke the lead with 17 seconds remaining in OT. In the locker room afterward, she was inconsolable, her occasional sobs amplified in the morgue-like quiet. It was just one of several blown opportunities by the Blue Devils in the last moments of that game, but Waner, who is notoriously hard on herself, was haunted by it for a long time afterward.

"It was extremely hard for me to get past it," says Waner, the 2005 national high school player of the year. "I took a month off and took an emotional and physical break from basketball. I tried to distance myself a little bit from what I was feeling from that game."

Waner spent her summer getting into better shape and finding ways to be a better scorer by working with former Duke men's player Marty Clark -- who also coaches her 14-year-old brother, Alex, on an AAU team in Colorado -- on different moves to create space to get her shot off.

But the Maryland game stayed with her. Finally, she talked to coach Gail Goestenkors, who passed on some advice. "One thing she told me is that I don't need to forget the game," says Waner. "If I forget I won't be able to learn from it, but I do need to move on. I know I have learned a lot more from that game than I would have if we had won."

What has she learned? "That you need to let things go, whether it's one mistake, an entire game or an entire season," she says. "I've always been so hard on myself that I'll carry a mistake over into the next play or the next game and pretty soon it's one big swamp. So I've really focused on letting things just slide off my back."

To help her in this cause, Waner has written "NEXT" on the top or her left shoe and "PLAY" on her right. Whenever she starts to feel herself "clench up inside" from frustration, she looks down at her shoes and sees a reminder to move on.

Letting go is no small achievement for the emotionally transparent Waner who, in a recent survey of teammates, was voted both most competitive and most likely to get a technical. "Abby is a perfectionist when it comes to basketball, and that can be a good thing," says teammate Lindsey Harding. "She's hard on herself in practice. If she's not making shots she thinks she should be making, she has a look on her face like someone just died. If it's our last pickup game and her team loses, she says, 'Run it back! Do it again!' She reminds me of Alana Beard that way. When Alana was here, she had to win the last game."