If you apply the quote living well is the best revenge, no team is living it better than the New York Liberty.
A year after being vanquished in four games by the Las Vegas Aces in the WNBA Finals, losing the deciding game by a point on their home floor, the Liberty spent a year ruminating on the defeat -- and learning from it. Those lessons paid off Sunday night, as the Liberty beat the Minnesota Lynx on their home floor to secure the franchise's first title.
"I've been manifesting this moment for a while. There's no feeling like it," Breanna Stewart said after Sunday's 67-62 overtime win.
Rare is the chance in professional sports to make it all the way to the edge of a championship, fall short, then climb back and win on a second try. Across the big four pro leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) and the WNBA, a team like the Liberty, who lost the Finals, then came back and won the next year, has become what I'll call one of those "Return Winners" just 59 times in total.
But rarer still is the "Revenge Winner," a champion who not only bounces back from losing the previous season's Finals, but who does it while going through the team that beat it a year earlier. The Liberty did this when they beat the Aces in the semifinals (though any win over Las Vegas en route to the title would have qualified, regardless of the round).
Across the five major leagues, that situation has only played out 30 times in history -- including twice in the WNBA specifically, now that the Liberty have pulled off the feat (see chart).
Let's rank the best of these revenge titlists in each of the five sports leagues, based on their Simple Rating System (SRS) grade from the season in question; then, at the end, we'll combine them into a single, cross-sport ranking to see where the Liberty stand in the annals of great revenge tales.