At last, Joan Daemen loses a NIST contest. :)

Presumably it helped that Ascon was also a CAESAR finalist.

Ascon is a Duplex Sponge construction, and an extremely good introduction to that concept is here:

https://codahale.com/the-joy-of-duplexes/

(Xoodyak, Coda's preferred Duplex, was a contestant --- Daemen's contestant, in fact.)