Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 4/6/2012

4/6/2010:
The University of Connecticut women's basketball team runs its winning streak to 78 games with a 53-47 win over Stanford in the NCAA championship game at the Alamodome in San Antonio. Connecticut trails 20-12 at halftime. The 12 points is a school record low for a half. But UConn breaks loose in the second half and leads 47-31 with 2:40 remaining before Stanford narrows the gap. Maya Moore leads the Huskies in the championship tilt with 23 points and 11 rebounds. It is Connecticut's second straight 39-0 season. Midway through the 2009-10 season, Geno Auriemma's squad broke the previous record winning streak in women's college basketball, which was 60 games and also held by Connecticut from 2001 through 2003.

Birthdays:
Ernie Lombardi b. 1908
Spider Lockhart b. 1943
Bert Blyleven b. 1957
Sterling Sharpe b. 1965
Bret Boone b. 1969

LIVING HISTORY

A massive and sweeping history of the Christian church by a professor of church history at Oxford University. Clocking in at over 1,000 pages and illustrated with color plates, it has time and space to explore philosophical questions regarding Christianity and finer points of Biblical scholarship, and does not ignore the politics that helped drive Christianity’s growth. It is an approach that The New York Times calls “sprawling, sensible and illuminating.”

CHRISTIANITY: THE FIRST THREE THOUSAND YEARS, by Diarmaid McCullough (Viking, 2010)