From the moment the brackets for the women’s basketball NCAA tournament were announced, Connecticut and Notre Dame were set on a collision course for the national championship.

The Huskies and Fighting Irish both entered the tournament with No. 1 seeds and undefeated records. They were the consensus top-two teams in the country for most of the season and arguably two of the top three programs over the past five years.

After UConn and Notre Dame met in the Final Four last season — the Huskies won, 83-65 — and the teams didn’t play this season because of the Fighting Irish’s move to the ACC, this has been the most anticipated, most desired matchup of the season.

But if the No. 4-seed Terrapins and No. 2-seed Stanford have their way, Tuesday’s national championship in Nashville, Tenn., will look a little more red.

“You know, just I think people, players in the tournament just kind of resent a little bit of the inevitability,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said in a teleconference Wednesday. “Like, why have the tournament if it’s inevitable? So we’re just — we definitely want to be party crashers.”

Despite having one of the nation’s best players — if not the best — in forward Alyssa Thomas, the Terps still flew under the radar for most of the season.

In a 16-1 start, the lone blemish came in the Terps’ highest profile nonconference game, in which UConn pulled away in the second half for a 72-55 victory at Comcast Center in November. And after that start, the Terps dropped three straight games, including road matchups at Virginia and N.C. State. In the third game of that stretch, Notre Dame opened up a 22-point lead and held off a late comeback for a 87-83 victory at Comcast Center.

The Terps couldn’t record a marquee victory against UConn or Notre Dame, and in February, they fell at Duke in another nationally televised game. The big win eluded the Terps, and entering the NCAA tournament, the expectations for the Terps from the outside weren’t very high.

“It’s great to be an underdog because you’re not expected to do anything, so the light’s not on you,” guard Katie Rutan said. “You’re not having to meet expectations. You create your own, so that’s what we’re doing.”

Eighty-seven percent of brackets filled out on ESPN.com had the Terps falling to the Lady Volunteers in the Sweet 16. Only 5.3 percent of the brackets had the Terps winning in the Elite Eight, and 1.3 percent of brackets picked the Terps to advance to the National Championship. If the Terps advance to the championship game, 0.5 percent of brackets have the Terps winning — the same percentage as for No. 3-seed Penn State, No. 4-seed Nebraska and No. 3-seed Texas A&M. None of those teams made it past the Sweet 16.

So the public expectations weren’t quite the same as for, say, the Lady Volunteers, who were the third-most popular choice to take home the title.

Frese has taken the Terps’ role as underdogs to heart, and the team has embraced it. In her locker-room speech aired on ESPN during the Terps’ win over No. 1-seed Tennessee, Frese told the Terps she wanted people to remember their name by the time the game was over. In the next game against No. 3-seed Louisville, she urged them to build on their profile.

They responded with a victory and a berth in their first Final Four since 2006.

“A lot of people did not expect us to be in the Final Four,” Thomas said. “I think we knew and [Frese] knew that we could get there, and I think the underdog role has really suited us well.”

Now, the task shifts from simply making the Final Four to bringing home a national championship — the program’s second and its first since 2006.

The Terps have toiled in relative anonymity this season, aside from Thomas; and even then, there wasn’t as much hype surrounding her as past stars, such as Notre Dame’s Skylar Diggins, Baylor’s Brittney Griner and Delaware’s Elena Delle Donne in ESPN’s “3 to See” campaign last season.

Plus, while the program has incredibly high internal expectations, there isn’t the same outside pressure as there is for UConn or Notre Dame to be in title competition every season.

“We don’t have any pressure on us like others do — the No. 1 seeds,” Rutan said. “I like it. It’s a breezeway up and it makes you less nervous, less anticipating, ‘I need to live up to this standard.’”

The Terps still have their goals, and Frese and the Terps have made it clear they want to return from Nashville as national champions.

And they’ve put themselves in a good position to, even if not many others expect it.

[ READ MORE: The Diamondback’s Guide to the Final Four ]