The party is on in Westwood, as UCLA women’s basketball capped a remarkable 37-1 season with a romp over Dawn Staley and South Carolina in the national title game on Sunday night. The Bruins lost an early non-conference showdown to Texas back in late November but then stormed through the Big Ten and eventually got revenge on the Longhorns in the Final Four, riding All-American Lauren Betts to one of the most impressive campaigns we’ve seen from any college team in any sport in recent years.

But this particular national title is sweet for reasons that go well beyond 2026. For all the success UCLA has had in basketball on the men’s side, the women entered this weekend bearing the weight of nearly 50 years of history — a championship drought so long, it predated the NCAA Tournament itself.

When was the last time UCLA women’s basketball won a national title?

Technically speaking, this was the first NCAA Tournament title UCLA has ever won in women’s basketball. Heck, the Bruins hadn’t even been to the Final Four until last year, when they lost to UConn in the national semifinal. The program experience some success in the late 1990s, including a trip to the Elite Eight in 1999, but things had been pretty barren before Cori Close took over at the start of the 2010s. Within a few years, Close had the Bruins as staples in the second weekend of the Big Dance, and now she has her first ring.

But UCLA does have one banner in women’s basketball, one that dates all the way back to 1978 — four years before the NCAA Tournament first debuted in 1982. Prior to that, the most prominent women’s college tournament in the country was run by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIWA), which determined the national champion at the end of each season.

The 1978 edition was the Bruins’ first AIWA Division I Tournament appearance, with head coach Billie Moore leading a team anchored by stars Ann Meyers, Denise Curry and Anita Ortega. UCLA won four in a row, three by double-digits, capped off by a 10-point win over Maryland to capture the program’s first title. They made it to the championship game again the next season, but Pat Summitt stole the stage with her first national championship.

Moore saw diminishing returns in the 1980s, as the sport grew in popularity with the advent of the NCAA Tournament. Now, though, Close has the program positioned to be a new power in the sport moving forward, particularly with how expertly she’s navigated roster retention and the transfer portal. There hasn’t been a repeat champion in the women’s game since UConn won three in a row from 2014-16, and losing a transcendent star in Betts will certainly make things more difficult. But for the first time in decades, the Bruins are on top of the women’s basketball world, and with some ideal real estate and all the momentum in the world, they don’t have to give it up any time soon.