Alyssa Thomas
RALEIGH, N.C. – Twelve players, four coaches and 200 or so red-clad fans seemed to know the future of the Terrapins women’s basketball team’s season hung by a thread late Tuesday night. For every second that ticked off the game clock overhead, the deficit on the scoreboard appeared to grow larger.
But even as top-seeded Notre Dame treated the ACC champions’ defense as a veritable layup line in an eventual 80-49 victory, it was still hard to shake the feeling that the No. 2 seed Terps would somehow crawl their way back into it.
They had done it too many times this season to count them out. They dug out of a 20-point second-half hole to beat Georgia Tech on Jan. 6, then came back from six points down two days later in the final 1:48 of regulation in an overtime win against North Carolina. They overcame a 12-point deficit to beat Duke on Feb. 19 and a nine-point margin to defeat Louisville in the second round of the NCAA Tournament on March 19.
Coach Brenda Frese even went as far as to reference her team’s “Maryland magic” after it mounted comebacks of 18 and 11 points in an 81-74 Sweet Sixteen victory against Texas A&M on Sunday.
The Terps seemed fortunate to sneak out of PNC Arena with a victory Sunday, but their good fortune ran out against the Fighting Irish.
“As you advance in the NCAA Tournament, you cannot keep playing with a deficit,” Frese said Monday. “Especially the really large one we suffered against Texas A&M the other night.”
It became evident early Tuesday night that the team hadn’t heeded its coach’s warning. Notre Dame took an early 12-12 tie and turned it into a commanding 40-21 halftime lead, putting the Terps in a trailing position they’d been in more times than they’d like to admit.
Yet it was a situation the Terps had grown comfortable in. Even as they entered the locker room down 19 points, hope never seemed to wane.
“Until the buzzer sounded,” guard Laurin Mincy said. “We always believed that we could come back.”
When guard Anjale Barrett took a defensive rebound from end to end for a fast-break layup to open the second half’s scoring, it looked for a moment like the Terps had life. The deficit was down to just 17 points, one fewer than the first-half margin they overcame against the Aggies on Sunday.
What allowed them to mount those comebacks in earlier games, however, failed the Terps on Tuesday night. After holding the Aggies to a paltry 35 percent second-half shooting mark during its 13-point comeback, the team allowed the Fighting Irish to hit better than 56 percent of their field goals over the final 20 minutes.
With the Terps’ defense struggling to put any sort of dent in Notre Dame’s ever-present offensive attack, the Fighting Irish never led by fewer than 26 points in the final 10 minutes of the contest, building leads as large as 32 in that span.
“We didn’t stop fighting to the end,” Barrett said. “It didn’t matter if we were down 30, 40 or 50; we were going to go down fighting and that’s what we did.”
Resilience had brought the Terps as far as the Raleigh, N.C., regional final, but that would be as far as it could take them. The list of comeback victories the Terps have captured this season is a long one. On Tuesday, the Fighting Irish made sure they wouldn’t be a part of it.
“They had a very good game plan,” Frese said. “We had no answer.”
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