Nearly 20 years after they first met, Karen Keyes and Muffet McGraw shared a telephone conversation that neither could have imagined when they arrived at Notre Dame together, just trying to adapt to their unfamiliar surroundings.

Keyes was a freshman guard on McGraw’s first Fighting Irish women’s basketball team, in 1987. Keyes scored more than 1,500 points in her career and served as a graduate assistant under McGraw for two years while earning a master’s degree in business. When Keyes married her husband, Kevin, in 1995, McGraw attended the ceremony. They remained close, even when Keyes moved to the East Coast and McGraw built the Irish into a top national program that has made the Final Four in each of the past five seasons; they lost to Connecticut in the national championship game last week.

During their talk in January, Keyes told McGraw that she and her husband had donated $5 million to endow the women’s basketball head coaching position at Notre Dame. Under the typical arrangement, the money is invested by the university, and any interest earned helps pay for a portion or all of the coach’s salary.