When Clarisse Machanguana got it going in the second half, so did Old Dominion. And now the Lady Monarchs are going someplace they haven't been for a while - the NCAA championship game.
Machanguana scored all 18 of her points after halftime Friday night as Old Dominion, which had struggled in its previous NCAA games, rallied from a 15-point deficit to take down high-flying Stanford 83-82 in a semifinal overtime thriller.The 6-foot-5 senior from Mozambique posted up strongly after some halftime prodding from coach Wendy Larry and made nine of 15 shots after taking only one shot in the first half.
"At halftime, coach Larry pretty much told me that the free-throw area was wide open and I had to do something," Machanguana said.
She did. And so did point guard Ticha Penicheiro, the Portuguese flash who drives the Lady Monarchs (34-1). Penicheiro scored 18 points, including a basket that produced the final tie in overtime and a free throw for the winning point.
"I knew as a captain, as a senior, as a point guard, I had to be the leader out there," Penicheiro said.
She hit a running shot with 1:28 left to tie the score at 82, then sank a free throw with 50 seconds remaining to put the Lady Monarchs up by one.
Stanford had a final chance after Penicheiro missed the front end of a 1-and-1 with 23.5 seconds left. But Jamila Wideman missed a jumper, Vanessa Nygaard couldn't hit on a follow and Wideman missed a 3-point shot from the right of the key just before the buzzer.
"I took the shot. It just didn't go down," said Wideman, who tumbled to the floor after missing the left-handed jumper. "I think there was contact. There was contact all game, though. Sometimes they called, sometimes they didn't. I just didn't get the call."
So it will be Old Dominion taking a 33-game winning streak to Sunday night's title game against Tennessee or Notre Dame. It will be the Lady Monarchs' first appearance in the finals since winning the championship in 1985.
The comeback was the largest ever in a semifinal game. Ohio State rallied from nine points down to beat Iowa in 1993.
Stanford (34-2), hoping to avenge an 83-66 loss at Old Dominion on Dec. 17, instead lost in the national semifinals for the third straight year.
The Cardinal had won their four previous NCAA games by an average of 32.8 points and seemed headed for another rout Friday, but it wasn't to be. A big reason was 29 turnovers against Old Dominion's relentless pressure. ODU had forced 28 in beating Stanford in December.
"Our team is very disappointed," Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said. "I thought we came out at the beginning of the game and did a good job playing the way we wanted to play. Unfortunately, we didn't do a good job taking care of the ball."
Old Dominion also turned up the defensive pressure in the second half, packing its post players inside to cut off that part of Stanford's game and then running a defender at Kate Stabird, who had burned the Lady Monarchs with 21 points on 7-for-8 shooting and four 3-pointers in the first half.
Starbird was 0-for-6 in the second half and finished with 26 points.
"In the locker room at halftime, we talked about how in order to stop Stanford we had to stop Kate Starbird," Penicheiro said. "We did a much better job on her in the second half.