GLENDALE, Ariz. — There is nothing that says more about the unfathomable NCAA-record 111-game winning streak of the UConn women’s basketball team than the fact that they turned the simple and inevitable act of losing — an act intrinsic to competitive sports — into breaking news, a basketball bulletin that was disseminated breathlessly into the empyrean of the information age. When the unavoidable becomes shocking you know you’ve breached any normal level of greatness.

Take a bow, coach Geno Auriemma and the UConn women’s hoopsters. You deserve it. I don’t care if it’s rock, paper, scissors, winning 111 consecutive times in any type of competitive endeavor is a remarkable accomplishment that deserves to be saluted and celebrated.

In case you’ve been in the sports closet or headed to bed early Friday night, the unbeatable, invincible UConn hoops machine finally lost, dropping a 66-64 overtime decision to Mississippi State in the women’s NCAA semifinals. Mississippi State’s Morgan William reaffirmed UConn’s mortality with a buzzer-beater. It caused the entire sports world to stop spinning on its axis and take notice. Here I am at the men’s Final Four in Phoenix writing about the women’s Final Four.

The postmortem of UConn’s 111-game run, the longest in Division 1 men’s or women’s basketball history, requires perspective. Of course the Huskies’ winning streak was good for women’s college basketball. It got people paying attention to and talking about the sport, whether out of appreciation, spite, or lamentation for more competition. It sparked a conversation about excellence equality and elevated the level of play in the women’s game. UConn provided college basketball — no gender qualifier needed — with both inspiration and antipathy. Auriemma’s Death Star in sneakers was both apogee and antagonist.

Every compelling drama needs a hero to root for and a villain to root against. Rarely, can that be the same entity. In the case of UConn, it was. That’s part of the beauty of their unparalleled excellence and the reaction to it.

UConn losing in the women’s Final Four is one of the greatest upsets in sports history. It’s up there with the 1980 US Olympic hockey team taking down the Soviets, the Patriots losing their perfect season to the Giants here in the stadium hosting the men’s Final Four, and heavyweight champion Mike Tyson losing to Buster Douglas in Tokyo in 1990. Actually, it was more like if Tyson had lost a rematch with Michael Spinks, who was infamously knocked out by Iron Mike in 91 seconds.

Normally, such a parallel wouldn’t do justice to a team that entered the tournament ranked seventh in the country and won their region as a 2-seed, as Mississippi State did. But UConn rendered normality irrelevant.

It seems that the Basketball Gods are not without a sense of humor. Mississippi State was the team that got obliterated by UConn in the Sweet 16 last year, trailing, 84-20, after three quarters and losing, 98-38. UConn turning Mississippi State into Road to the Final Four roadkill led colleague Dan Shaughnessy to opine that UConn’s dominance was killing the women’s game. That drew the ire of Auriemma, who fired back and insinuated that only women’s teams and athletes were punished for transcending their sport and their competition — or lack thereof.

Auriemma is obviously protective of his legacy and of the accomplishments of players such as Rebecca Lobo, Shea Ralph, Swin Cash, Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Maya Moore, and Breanna Stewart. UConn has won 11 NCAA titles under Auriemma, all of them since 1995. UConn entered this year’s tournament as the four-time defending national champion and stretched its streak of Final Fours to 10.

The Huskies’ erstwhile winning streak broke their own mark for the longest in Division 1 college basketball history. UConn had a 90-game winning streak from 2008-10, besting the 88-game run of the famed UCLA men’s teams of John Wooden, the exemplar of college basketball eminence.

Nothing can diminish what UConn accomplished or its importance to advancing women’s college basketball. But Shaughnessy’s point was lost in a hail of recriminations. Sports are unscripted entertainment in a world where even so-called “reality shows’’ fabricate feuds and artificially enhance plotlines. Sports are the ultimate reality television. UConn was the ultimate spoiler alert. You knew what was going to happen before the ball was tipped off. A whopping 61 of UConn’s victories came by 40 points or more and 108 came by a double-digit margin. That was a turnoff for some. That doesn’t automatically make those people sexist. It makes them competition connoisseurs.

Just as teams that habitually lose can engender ennui because the outcome feels predetermined, the same can happen with winning teams if you don’t have an emotional investment in the team or the sport. That’s why outside of New England, watching the Patriots’ dynasty feels like watching “Grey’s Anatomy’’ drag on endlessly.

UConn’s winning never needed to be framed as a false binary choice between embracing and appreciating greatness or undermining gender equality by complaining you weren’t always entertained by it.

If you want to warp your mind keep this in mind, it was 865 days between defeats for UConn. They fell to Stanford in overtime on Nov. 17, 2014, one day after Jonas Gray (remember him?) ran for 201 yards and a franchise-record four touchdowns for the Patriots in a 42-20 victory over the Indianapolis Colts. That road loss ended a 47-game winning streak for the Queens of the Court.

As Auriemma said after his team’s defeat, he can still appreciate losing. Coaches can be cranky and paranoid, but Auriemma saw that this year’s UConn team was less inexperienced and more vulnerable.

UConn had the first three players taken in the 2016 ­WNBA draft in Stewart, Moriah Jefferson, and Morgan Tuck. The team only had two starters returning — junior Kia Nurse and sophomore Katie Lou Samuelson, who along with fellow sophomore Napheesa Collier earned first-team All-America honors this season.

The streak wasn’t theirs. They were just the torchbearers charged with its protection.

Now, it’s over. History is written by the victors. UConn elevated victory to such rote inevitability that losing at all became historic.

Christopher L. Gasper can be reached at cgasper@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @cgasper.