St. Petersburg Times continues its national coverage of women's basketball: Traditional powers remain strong in women's college basketball.

If you're wondering which teams will meet in the women's Final Four in St. Louis, a natural starting point would be the four who finished 2008 in Tampa, where Tennessee beat Stanford in the national championship game.

Women's basketball, you see, is an active recycler. For the past eight years, at least one Final Four team has made it back the next year, with two or more teams returning to the national semifinals five times in that span. The men, by comparison, went four years from 2003-06 with 16 different teams in the Final Four. (notes Helen: let's not forget the impact of the early jump to the NBA...)