The Stanford-Tennessee women’s basketball rivalry started innocently enough.

Tara VanDerveer (left) and Pat Summit chat before their 2007 meeting, which was the last time they played at Maples Pavilion and the only time in the past 14 meetings that Stanford won -- Associated Press photo

Tara VanDerveer, then a young coach at a place with no basketball tradition, simply wanted to give her rising star, Jennifer Azzi, a chance to play in her home state against the national powerhouse team that had not to recruited Azzi even though she lived just 20 miles from the Tennessee campus.

 In that first meeting, on Dec. 18, 1988, in Knoxville, Tenn., No. 1-ranked Tennessee humbled the upstart Cardinal by 23 points. A year later at Stanford, however, the Cardinal upset No. 2 Tennessee 85-71,at that moment establishing itself as an elite program and setting the stage for the Cardinal’s run to a national championship that season.

The two teams have met at least once each season since, a run of 22 consecutive seasons, if you include Saturday’s upcoming 11:30 a.m. clash between the No. 2 Cardinal and No. 3 Vols at Stanford.

Stanford-Tennessee represents one of the two types of sports rivalries. One is built over time because of proximity, similar athletic and/or academic goals, feigned hatred for each other and a long history of competition between the two. You know the list – Harvard-Yale, Cal-Stanford, Michigan-Ohio State and on and on. Every school has one.

 Those meetings usually consist of a ceremonial throwing out the record books, the recalling of classic meetings of the past, snide comments about the opponent’s heritage, and the awarding of some weird trophy that tends to get stolen periodically in the name of good college fun. This rivalry seems more like a marketing ploy that an athletic competition sometimes.

 The other kind of rivalry is seldom based on proximity or any orchestrated tradition. It just sort of happens because two good teams play each other often, creating a special interest among the participants and the fans. It’s not a rivalry so much as an annual status report pitting two of the best against each other.

 Yankees-Red Sox is probably most intense such rivalry, and Lakers-Celtics has a certain cultural/regional clash. In college football, USC-Notre Dame fits into this category, but no such thing exists in men’s college basketball (Duke-North Carolina falls into the first rivalry category).

 In women’s basketball it is Stanford-Tennessee, or at least that’s the case we’re making here. It would be Tennessee-Connecticut if Vols coach Pat Summit and UConn coach Gene Auriemma got along and played each other every year, but that’s not the case, so instead the honor falls to Stanford and Tennessee.

There may be some debate whether a series in which one team has won 21 of the 26 meetings, as Tennessee has, can be called a rivalry. OK, call it a compelling series then, because it has to mean something when two schools 3,000 miles apart will meet for the 13th time when both schools are ranked in the top five. And it has to mean something to the Stanford faithful, too, because the Tennessee game is expected to be a sellout, even though tickets for that game are priced higher than for any other Stanford home game, including the Cal game.

Three times Stanford and Tennessee played when they were ranked 1-2 (Tennessee won all three), and Saturday’s game comes pretty close with the Cardinal ranked No. 2 and the Vols No. 3.

But it’s more than that, as Stanford continues a pursuit of Tennessee that may never end:

 – Summit ranks first in women’s coaching victories alltime, and VanDerveer is fifth alltime and fourth among active coaches.

 – Summit has eight national titles, VanDerveer two.

 – Tennessee has 12 former players in the WNBA, Stanford has three.

 – And Tennessee is the only team that has a winning record against Stanford since VanDerveer became head coach. VanDerveer’s Cardinal even has a 5-4 record against Connecticut, but she is just 5-21 against Summit. (Actually West Virginia is 1-0 against Stanford, but that lone meeting was in 1986 when Stanford was a mediocre program and VanDerveer was in her second season on the Farm. You get the point.)    

The Vols even beat Stanford in overtime last season, when the Cardinal wound up ranked No. 2 and advanced to the Final Four, while Tennessee finished at No. 18 and lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. In fact, Stanford has won only one of its past 14 games against Tennessee, although that one Cardinal win came the last time the teams met at Maples Pavilion, in 2007, and the Cardinal has a 34-game home winning streak going now.