After chasing the most elusive grail, a lifetime of basketball devoted to winning a championship, Kayla Thornton admits she’s stunned by the moment now that it’s here.
Sunday night, on the occasion of her 32nd birthday, the UTEP and Irvin alum Thornton heard the final horn sound in overtime of Game 5 of the WNBA Championships with her New York Liberty on top of the Minnesota Lynx, 67-62.
She saw the confetti fall from the rafters and the screaming crowd, and she hugged the WNBA championship trophy. Thornton went on Good Morning America with the rest of her team, and she’ll be on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon Wednesday night.
In all her life, Sunday night marked the first time the last horn of the season ended with her team ahead on the scoreboard and lifting a trophy. Thornton has dreamed about this since she was young enough to understand what a championship was.
She just lived it.
“I really haven’t had time to grasp everything,” Thornton said from New York Tuesday night. She’ll head to El Paso on Thursday for another round of celebrations. “It’s been going from party to party, TV shows, morning shows, stuff like that.
“It’s been a lot, but the most important thing, it’s a blessing. I haven’t even grasped that I’m a champion. My messages, I have like 300-plus, I’m trying to reach out to everybody and tell them thank you.
“It’s a lot.”
Thornton and her teammates did a lot. A season after coming up short in the WNBA Championship series against the league’s other “Super Team,” the Las Vegas Aces, the Liberty eliminated the Aces in the semifinal to earn the right to play for the title against Minnesota.
The Liberty were solid favorites, but the series went the full five games and then to overtime, which New York won 7-2. Thornton was in the game playing at the end of regulation and again at the end of overtime, logging 21 minutes in the final game in her normal role as sixth player.
Going into overtime, “All I remember is calling on Jesus, everybody praying,” Thornton said. “It was a rough game. It came down to our defense. We won that game through our defense. It was sticking together, not losing our heads, locking in on the main thing at that time and getting it done.”
Then the game ended.
“It was a relief, a burden that fell off,” she said. “I finally could breathe. The atmosphere, being there in front of an amazing crowd of fans, celebrities who’ve been supporting New York. It was amazing.
“It’s a blessing. Especially to win it on my birthday. There are a lot of things I can say, but No. 1 is, God is good. God works in mysterious ways, his timing on when things will happen. But we stayed the course, we believed.
“It was delayed but it wasn’t denied.”
Thornton expanded on that “relief” angle. She was traded from Dallas to New York last season in a blockbuster deal that also saw New York acquire former league MVP and 2004 finals MVP Jonquel Jones. The Liberty ended up with a team full of superstars, including Sabrina Ionescu and Brienna Stewart.
“It was a lot of pressure,” Thornton said. “Everybody tried to come for us. We started off last year with everybody saying, ‘They put a super team together thinking they were going to win,’ stuff like that.
“We had a lot of things on our back, a lot of outside noise, but we did a great job of keeping that outside noise under control. We knew what we had to do each moment, grasping the moment. That’s what was important, not looking too far ahead but on the main thing at that time.”
Thornton said her team’s ability to tune out outside factors was definitive in the championship run.
“Our togetherness,” she said. “We’ve been through this before, last year when we fell short. We knew we didn’t get what we needed last year, so just locking in on what is important.
“This team is special because nothing mattered to us but winning, our ultimate goal. It didn’t matter who scored, who did this or that. Whatever needed to be done, we were fine with that. We have a team that puts our pride and ego aside and sacrifices for the bigger cause of the team.
“It turned out to be this.”
There’s more in front of her. Thornton will have her number retired at both Irvin (the week of Nov. 5, the exact day is TBA) and UTEP (No. 10). UTEP’s all-time leading scorer and rebounder (from 2010-14) will be the first women’s basketball player to have her jersey retired.
Then she’ll head to Turkey to play a season there. Last year she played through the winter in Russia.
She’ll be back in New York next spring to do something else she’s never done before, defend a championship of this magnitude.
“Everybody is going to be gunning for us,” Thornton said. “We definitely know what it takes. We have that core and that relationship.
“It’s going to be exciting.”
This is an exciting time all around for the 32-year-old champion.
Bret Bloomquist can be reached at bbloomquist@elpasotimes.com; @Bretbloomquist on X.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Kayla Thornton revels in first WNBA championship with NY Liberty
