This month’s NCAA women’s basketball championship final had a decided past-is-prologue feel when Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw lamented her sport’s dearth of “women in power.” For only the eighth time in the last 20 years, both coaches in the title game—McGraw and her Baylor counterpart, Kim Mulkey—were female.

And the context for current gender-equity issues certainly includes the personal histories of McGraw and Mulkey.

In the late 1970s, when McGraw, upon graduation from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, competed in the WBL, the first women’s pro league, 32 of the 42 people who held head coaching positions—several for as few as one game over the WBL’s brief and troubled three-year existence—were male.

A couple of years later, when Mulkey was an all-American guard at Louisiana Tech, the team’s preparation and in-game coaching were handled by a man, Leon Barmore, though his title was “assistant.” The titular head coach, Sonja Hogg, sat on the bench for games but stuck to the second banana’s job of recruiter and luncheon speaker.

In 1982, that Louisiana Tech team won the first women’s national tournament sponsored by the NCAA. The previous 10 women’s versions of the Big Dance had been run on a shoestring by the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, while then-NCAA executive director Walter Byers insisted that facilitating women’s teams would “destroy the NCAA and college sports as we know them.”

But as Title IX, the 1971 law banning sex discrimination in education, slowly took effect, Byers wound up in the stands for that initial NCAA-backed title game in Norfolk, Va. He was there to witness Louisiana Tech’s 14-point victory over Cheney State, and to see the shortest player on the court—5-foot-4 Kim Mulkey—seize control in the second half.

During Tech’s decisive 20-2 run, Mulkey drove the lane for a layup, drove again and dished to senior Pam Kelly for a layup, lobbed a pass to leading scorer Janice Lawrence for another gimmee, sank a 20-foot set shot and looped another assist to Lawrence.

“Hey, gang,” Hogg said then, “this is what it’s all about. The NCAA will give us credibility. Exposure.” Also money, with the women’s tournament teams receiving travel expenses for the first time.

But something else happened under NCAA control. The proportion of female head coaches in women’s college basketball programs, at more than 90 percent in the early 1970s, has steadily dropped to under 60 percent.

As one way to reverse that trend, McGraw declared during Final Four weekend that it is her intention to never again hire a man as assistant. Predictably, there was the rejoinder that the most successful college women’s basketball coach in history—a guy, UConn’s Geno Auriemma—has done plenty to advance females in the sport by showcasing a record 11 national championships and by employing all women on his staff.

Mulkey, furthermore, wouldn’t go beyond saying she “understands” McGraw’s position. “I want the best person for the job,” said Mulkey, whose top assistant at Baylor is male. In 2008, in fact, Mulkey hired Barmore, the former Louisiana Tech championship architect, who served as her Baylor assistant for three seasons.

It could be that Mulkey’s experience, in terms of female-male balance, always was closer to cosmic justice than McGraw’s. During Mulkey’s playing days at Tech, that school’s women’s athletic budget equaled the men’s, even though there were 12 men’s teams and only three women’s.

But McGraw’s promise of women-only on her staff, in the face of the sport’s big-picture numbers, forces the contemplation that the past isn’t entirely past.