WILMINGTON, Del. – Trailing by three points with five seconds left on the clock, the UMass women’s basketball team needed a miracle. Luckily for them, the Minutewomen have been making the impossible look easy for a few seasons now.

Point guard Destiney Philoxy brought the ball down the floor – who else? – and dished it off to Sydney Taylor, who was playing with a fractured bone underneath her eye. She squared up and let the ball fly for a triple, going back to her roots as a three-point sniper, and everyone in Chase Fieldhouse held its collective breath.

The ball hit nothing but net at the same time the buzzer sounded to end regulation, and the sizable UMass contingent at the arena erupted. The Atlantic 10 Conference title game was headed to overtime. 

LET'S KEEP PLAYING!!

Sydney Taylor hits the game-tying three at the buzzer to send this one to OT#Flagship🚩 pic.twitter.com/iic6bfw2Sy

— UMass Women's Basketball (@UMassWBB) March 5, 2023

Sunday’s instant classic between No. 1 UMass and No. 3 Saint Louis will go down as one of the greatest championship games in A1o basketball history. Unfortunately for the Minutewomen, it didn’t end in the top seed’s favor.

The Billikens snatched control in OT, capturing a 91-85 victory to earn the program’s first-ever Atlantic 10 championship. Julia Martinez recorded a triple-double for Saint Louis with 17 points, 13 rebounds and 12 assists, and earned the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award.

Ber’Nyah Mayo was voted onto the All-Tournament team for UMass, finishing the championship game with 14 points, three boards and two assists. Kyla McMakin and Brooke Flowers from Saint Louis and Addie Budnik from Richmond rounded out the five-player all-championship team. 

Taylor led the team in scoring with 18 points and added five boards and three assists. Breen recorded a double double with 17 points and 11 rebounds and Angelique Ngalakulondi posted 15 points and four boards. 

“I just left the locker room (of) a team that's highly upset and I told them to hold up their heads. It’s been a great ride. I appreciate the journey that they've taken us on… and they should be proud. We won a lot of games and today just wasn't our day,” UMass head coach Tory Verdi said. “We have plenty of days where everything's going our way and we're clicking on all cylinders on both sides of the ball. I just felt that it was hard. It was hard to get any momentum throughout the course of the game here today.”

All year, the reigning A10 champions have mentioned they’re the hunters, not the hunted. But on Sunday, UMass ran into prey that fought back. The Billikens used the Minutewomen’s own mindset against them – last year’s ‘us against the world’ UMass team that was fighting for respect was desperate to win in the best way possible. It was the same for Saint Louis this year, as the squad was picked 12th in the Atlantic 10 preseason poll with a new coach and new players, ready to battle anyone that dared to suggest they weren’t contenders for a title.

“Being a new team, everyone says stuff – it’s a rebuilding period, all that stuff, and there was a point where we were the only ones who were really believing in ourselves. I think that that makes you such a dangerous team, because hope is so dangerous,” McMakin said. “We never shied away from the word of championship, and I think that's such an important thing that (Saint Louis head coach Rebecca) Tillet does. She's never shy about saying we're working for a championship. A lot of teams, a lot of coaches are gonna try to stay away from that. We embraced it.” 

The Minutewomen (26-6) never could find their rhythm against a Saint Louis team that’s core strategy was to “dictate and disrupt.” McMakin and Martinez got to work right away for the Billikens – McMakin put up nine points in the first quarter alone and Martinez dished out five assists. The two teams were tied 19-19 after the first 10 minutes, but UMass wasn’t able to get any consistent momentum against the No. 3 seed.

“We struggled at times, and it was just about the rotations... we’ve never given this many points in transition defensively,” Verdi said. “We broke down. Our game plan coming into this game was to contain dribble penetration….we didn't play our best defensively. I’ve said this all along – if you don’t play defense and you don't rebound, it's really hard to win a championship.” 

The two teams continued throwing punches back and forth, entering halftime knotted up a 37 points apiece. The Billikens outscored UMass in the third frame, taking the lead three minutes into the third frame and holding it as tightly as they could into the fourth. A 5-0 run from Kennedy Calhoun gave them an eight-point lead, the largest in the game, and forced a UMass timeout. 

There were sparks of greatness – Ngalakulondi’s impressive defense in the paint, Sam Breen hitting a clutch 3-pointer late to give the Minutewomen the lead after struggling all game, Taylor’s triple to force OT that has already become UMass legend. But in the overtime frame, UMass simply ran out of gas. The Minutewomen went 2-for-10 from the field and were outrebounded, 9-6. Saint Louis received clutch buckets from McMakin and Calhoun, and racked up 10 points from the free throw line.

For every UMass bucket, Saint Louis had an answer, and it will be the Billikens who will go dancing in the NCAA tournament with the conference’s automatic bid because of it. 

UMass will have to wait and see if it did enough to earn an at-large bid into the Big Dance. The Selection Show will air on ESPN on Sunday, March 12 at 8 p.m. If the Minutewomen don’t find themselves on the bracket, they’ve already earned an auto-bid to the WNIT tournament as conference regular season champions. Their season is far from over – but where they go from here remains to be see. 

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