Duke lived a basketball lifetime in the span of three weeks. Propelled by potential in the season's early days, then tested to a breaking point by a brutal stretch of games against national contenders in recent weeks, No. 13 Duke routed No. 8 Kentucky 89-68 on Sunday for its first win in nearly three years against an opponent ranked ahead of it.

From untested to a team better for its experiences in 21 days. Even fruit flies saunter through life by comparison. Except No. 3 Texas lived a similar cycle in about 40 minutes Sunday afternoon against No. 4 Texas A&M.

A season that will age some coaches prematurely also offers rewards for teams that play beyond their experience.

When the seventh AP poll came out a season ago, the teams in the top 15 had just seven losses among them. Nine of those teams were still unbeaten. When this season's seventh poll comes out, assuming Oregon State moves up and Stanford moves down, the top 15 will likely include just four unbeaten teams. Those teams that are ranked in the top 15 will have 15 losses among them (that number will be higher still if Stanford, the team that handed Connecticut its lone loss, remains a part of that club after losses at Chattanooga and Tennessee in the past week).

Every team is going to stumble this season. The stumble might be for a run, a half, a game or a week. But more than most seasons, no team is immune, which is why what Texas and Duke did Sunday -- one to remain unbeaten and the other to avoid a rare fourth loss before Christmas -- matters a lot in the moment and a little in the long march to Tampa.

Texas has considerably more history on its side than Texas A&M in the overall story of women's college basketball. But in the chapters relevant to Sunday's game in North Little Rock, Arkansas, not even Bevo himself could have stopped the scales from tilting in the opposite direction. Texas A&M had the coach who won a national championship in 2011. It had stars such as Courtney Walker and Courtney Williams, who spent most of their time in college ranked and playing big games. Not that she hasn't done everything humanly possible for it to be otherwise, but Texas senior Nneka Enemkpali has played in a total of three NCAA tournament games. She's the experienced one.

It was also Texas that played without one of its key players, freshman Ariel Atkins, and with another, Imani McGee-Stafford, still rounding into form in just her second game back from injury. Perhaps the team's best bet to create her own points, Atkins scored 16 points in a win against Stanford and 12 points in a win against Tennessee.

Early on, Texas looked like the team that didn't know it was supposed to play hesitantly in big games. Much as she was a factor early in a win against Tennessee, Kelsey Lang scored her team's first eight points, and the Longhorns had the run of the paint. As the pace slowed, Rachel Mitchell and Texas A&M's rotating cast of frontcourt players occupied Lang, Enemkpali and McGee-Stanford inside and Jordan Jones led a harassing effort on the perimeter, Texas looked young in a different way -- like the team that would get taken out of its game plan on a big stage.

Only that didn't happen. Down by as many as nine points and still down by seven points with a little more than eight minutes to play, Texas came back from the standing eight count. It got its best player -- or its best player got herself -- involved, with Enemkpali totaling 13 points, eight rebounds and two steals in the second half. Largely but not solely through her, Texas got its points in the paint. Fittingly, Empress Davenport, who had to watch much of the game in foul trouble, scored five points in the final four-plus minutes to complete the effort.

What matters in the moment is Davenport's final layup kept the Longhorns unbeaten, with three wins no other team can match. But even if that shot had missed or Jones' runner in the closing seconds had gone in to complete an otherwise brilliant day, what matters in the long run is Texas surged, stumbled but then stuck in.

Stretch the time period out over three weeks, and the same is true for Duke, which stumbled when it lost a lead and the game at Texas A&M, lost at Nebraska without Elizabeth Williams and lost a one-point decision at home against top-ranked South Carolina. So what happened this week, with games against Oklahoma and Kentucky sandwiched around UMass-Lowell? Well, Williams played like the national player of the week, and freshmen Sierra Calhoun, Rebecca Greenwell and Azura Stevens combined to average 43.0 points, 21.3 rebound and 6.0 assists. That included 39 points with a manageable seven turnovers against Kentucky's pressure, albeit without Bria Goss.

• 1. How does a program replace someone such as Natasha Howard? If you aren't Connecticut -- for that matter, even if you are -- it isn't easy to move onward and upward without a post player who averaged nearly 20 points and 10 rebounds per game. But how about with someone who is part of a club even Howard couldn't crack?

Through Saturday, there were only four players in the ACC, American, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pac-12 or SEC averaging a double-double and at least two blocks per game. Duke's Elizabeth Williams is the easy answer, and Minnesota's Amanda Zahui might be too. Syracuse sophomore Briana Day is on the list. But the name that might be least known is Florida State's Adut Bulgak. The Canadian who came to Tallahassee by way of junior college had 26 points, 11 rebounds and two blocks against North Florida and 15 points, 14 rebounds and two blocks against Savannah State this past week. Florida State's schedule is about to get a whole lot more difficult, but watching Bulgak adjust to the ACC -- and perhaps vice versa -- will be one of the intriguing stories for the second half of the season.

• 2. If the tiebreaker in the tournament hosted by Rollins College was which team played better in losing to Baylor, Syracuse would have claimed second place ahead of Michigan State. Thankfully for Michigan State, there was no such need. With the start of Big Ten play looming next weekend and an intriguing opener for the Spartans against a Northwestern team that was undefeated until losing Sunday to Arizona State, the Spartans produced one of their most notable wins in years by beating Syracuse 89-76 on Sunday. To find another out-of-conference win of that caliber, you probably have to go back to a win at Florida State in 2010.

Embarrassed by Baylor after a 13-point halftime lead became a 19-point defeat, Michigan State responded. It's noteworthy the Spartans didn't just win a bad game. Their star players took this win by outplaying good competition, Aerial Powers performing like an All-American with 32 points and 17 rebounds, and Tori Jankoska taking ownership late to finish with 25 points, 10 rebounds, four assists and just two turnovers in 39 assertive minutes.

• 3. Just in case anyone forgot, there is still a Schimmel doing nifty things on the basketball court for Louisville. Overshadowed by some of Sunday's early games, No. 10 Louisville picked up a quality road result with a 70-57 win at No. 24 California. It is Louisville's second win of the season against a ranked team but the first on the road. In 36 minutes, Jude Schimmel totaled 11 points, nine rebounds, seven assists, two steals and just two turnovers. She bested Brittany Boyd in every category but points (they tied). Earlier in the week, Schimmel put up 12 points, 10 assists, six rebounds and no turnovers in a rout of Old Dominion. She will always be Shoni's sister, but she's also a key starter, distributor, 3-point shooter and ballhawk for a top-10 basketball team.

• 4. The weekend didn't go so well for Southern Illinois, which lost to Oregon State and Toledo in a tournament in New Orleans (though it was as competitive in its loss against the former as North Carolina was earlier in the week, so there's that). It's a win this past Tuesday against Murray State that merits mention, and not just because junior Dyana Pierre turned in the basketball equivalent of a perfect game with 31 points and no turnovers on 14-of-14 shooting.

That 78-63 result marked the sixth win of the season for the Salukis, a greater win total than all of the past season. Or the season before that. Or the 2010-11 season. Or the 2009-10 season. Well, you get the point. Much as Oregon State was at one point in the recent past perhaps the most shambolic major program in the country, Southern Illinois arguably set the pace for all programs. But quietly, because there is no other way in Carbondale, Illinois, second-year coach Cindy Stein, former longtime Missouri coach, might be turning around an aircraft carrier of failure.

Perhaps some or all of the above should have called Lizzy Wendell. The Drake sophomore scored 43 points in 33 minutes in Sunday's in-state rivalry game against Iowa, hitting 15-of-24 shots, including 7-of-11 shots from the 3-point line, and all six of her free throw attempts. It wasn't enough to avoid defeat against the Hawkeyes, but it was enough to fuel one of the wildest endings of the season. Wendell's total included 10 points in the final 98 seconds, and eight points in the final 66 seconds, the latter when the teams somehow combined for 24 points before a last-second Drake heave missed and Iowa held on for a 100-98 win.

Without Kyndal Clark, the reigning Missouri Valley Conference player of the year who was injured in the opening game this season, Wendell is averaging 23.2 points per game this season and doing so on 51 percent shooting.

Both Michigan State's Aerial Powers and Duke's Elizabeth Williams deserve honorable mention. So, too, does South Florida's Courtney Williams. After putting up 23 points, nine rebounds and six assists in an expected win against Northern Colorado, she totaled 34 points and 11 rebounds in Sunday's overtime win at Penn State. Teammate Alisia Jenkins also put up big numbers for the Bulls, whose only losses this season are against Maryland, Kentucky and St. John's.

Oregon State: All you need to know about the state of the Oregon State program when Scott Rueck arrived is that the Division III George Fox team he left would have been a favorite against the Division I team from Corvallis. For one thing, it could have put five players on the court. But after an unbeaten start against a modest schedule this season, Oregon State put the exclamation mark on its revival with a 70-55 win at North Carolina. The busy Beavers went on to beat Southern Illinois and Nevada in a weekend tournament in New Orleans, but the win in Chapel Hill stood apart.

Even a season ago, when Oregon State reached the Pac-12 championship game, returned to the NCAA tournament for the first time in nearly 20 years and won a first-round game against Middle Tennessee State, the biggest victories were arguably still of the moral variety -- testing Notre Dame at home, pushing Cal on the road and playing with South Carolina in the NCAA tournament. The monumental progress Oregon State had made notwithstanding, it was still 1-8 against teams from the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC (the win against Clemson), and 0-14 against Pac-12 powers Cal and Stanford under Rueck.

The win against the Tar Heels wasn't of the moral variety but of the dominant variety in which the visitors didn't even need a good shooting night from Sydney Wiese. With Ruth Hamblin powering an effort inside that left North Carolina's talented frontcourt ineffective, Oregon State just played like the better team.

Indiana State coach Joey Wells had a different challenge in his first season than Rueck. Wells inherited a veteran team coming off a WNIT appearance a season ago, but he inherited it in the middle of August after Curt Miller's resignation at Indiana set off a chain of events that left Teri Moren to tell her Indiana State players she was taking the Indiana job as the Sycamores prepared to leave for a summer trip to Costa Rica.

High drama? Not so much. Indiana State knocked St. John's from the list of unbeatens Sunday in double overtime to win that team's holiday tournament. That leaves the Sycamores at 10-1 with wins against the ranked Red Storm and former coach Moren and Indiana.

Aside from a smattering of games Monday and Tuesday, it's a quiet week. So we skip ahead to when play resumes.

Cal State Northrdidge vs. Florida Gulf Coast (Sunday): This is part of what could be a highly competitive tournament in Philadelphia with Saint Joseph's and Quinnipiac. Reigning Big West player of the year Ashlee Guay prepped for the trip east with totals of 41 points, nine assists and seven steals in wins this past week at Northern Arizona and San Diego State, while Janae Sharp scored 40 points for the Matadors in those games. Along with Cinnamon Lister, it's the Northridge backcourt that will have to take care of the ball against an opponent shooting 47 percent.

Georgia at Seton Hall (Sunday): Wins this past week against Fairfield and NJIT are minor notes on a résumé that already included wins against Penn State, Saint Joseph's, Creighton and Illinois, but the most recent results pushed Seton Hall's winning streak to 10 games. Seton Hall was 38 games below .500 in Anne Donovan's three seasons and 58 games below .500 since the start of the 1999-2000 season. It is 16 games above .500 in one and a half seasons under Tony Bozzella and playing like a legitimate threat to DePaul in the Big East.

Green Bay at Dayton (Sunday): It has already been a great season for high-profile mid-major games, but if Dayton's season-opening visit to Gonzaga doesn't prove to be the marquee such encounter, this might be. Fresh off a win at Vanderbilt (one of the two teams to beat Green Bay this season) on Sunday, Dayton looks more like the team it was expected to be when it was ranked in the preseason. The Flyers have a tight rotation, depth a decided edge for Green Bay if Mariah Monke returns from an injury, but this should be a game played with a lot of pace and passing.

Oregon State at Tennessee (Sunday): Tennessee's recent run of form has been fueled in part by the return of Isabelle Harrison, solidifying the frontcourt defense alongside Bashaara Graves and Cierra Burdick. But Ruth Hamblin is a different kind of post presence than the Lady Vols have encountered in their recent wins, and she has size around her. Rutgers' Rachel Hollivay didn't score much against Tennessee, but she caused problems in other ways. Texas' Nneka Enemkpali and Kelsey Lang routed the Lady Vols, albeit without Harrison. This is a big, pun intended, test.