COLLEGE PARK, Mary. - One story Sunday night at Cole Field House was the way No. 5 Duke quickly turned a close game at halftime into a 16-point cushion and held on for a somewhat-comfortable 75-64 victory over Maryland.
The more compelling story Sunday night, however, was the way in which a potential blowout became a close game in the first place.
Up by eight points with a little more than three minutes left following an Iciss Tillis three-pointer, the Blue Devils had the struggling Terrapins clinging to the ropes. In their two previous contests, the Terps had been massacred to the combined tune of 70 points, and Sunday they were ready to cave again. All that was needed was the finishing blow.
Three straight trips down the court Duke had the ball up by seven points; three straight trips down the court Duke found ways to let Maryland off the hook. Rometra Craig, traveling; Missy West open jumper, misses badly; Tillis, turnover.
Maryland's Renneik Razor picked up the loose ball and went coast to coast for a layup, which became a three-point play to cut the lead to four when Craig committed a freshman foul. On Duke's ensuing possession, Tillis again gave the ball away, this time trying to cram a pass through traffic to a cutting Alana Beard. The Terps drove the court and trimmed the deficit to only two points, and two more empty-handed possessions for the Blue Devils suddenly enabled upstart Maryland to tie the game.
No vicious knockout had been delivered, the challenger was still standing.
Soon the bell rang-halftime. It was a three-point lead, and it might have been squared at 28-28 if not for a controversial three-point play by LaNedra Brown as the buzzer sounded. What could have been a daunting advantage with even minimal execution on offense was instead anybody's game.
"Again we had our post players in foul trouble and that didn't help us to have two starters out, but we were turning it over and there's no excuse for that," coach Gail Goestenkors said, referring to her team's nine first-half turnovers. "You're not going to score if you keep turning the ball over. I think we lost our focus."
Last Thursday against Georgia Tech, the Blue Devils nearly slammed the door shut on the Yellow Jackets midway through the first half when Tillis gave them a 22-13 lead off a fast-break layup. With the game at their fingertips, however, the Blue Devils played nearly two minutes of scoreless basketball after sandwiching two turnovers around a missed layup by Sheana Mosch. Georgia Tech slowly but surely narrowed the deficit, and the game was question until the final buzzer.
Sunday did not come down to the wire, but the same troubling lack of a killer instinct was evident.
Even after the brief but costly collapse at the end of the first half, Duke had another chance to deliver Maryland the death-blow early in the second half. Behind a surreal half from Beard, Duke built its lead to 15 points in eight minutes, and the lead hovered there until Beard made it 55-39 with 8:28 to play. The opportunity was there again for the Blue Devils, who could have handed Maryland its third straight embarrassment.
In less than two minutes, however, a porous defense yielded eight points while Beard could contribute only two to Duke's cause, and the Terps again made it a ballgame. They still trailed by double-digits (10, to be exact), but they were in the game when they clearly should not have been.
"I'm not sure [why the lead slipped away], we're going to have to figure that out," Goestenkors said. "This has been the second game in a row where I felt like we had a team on the ropes and were on the verge of putting them away, and then we made some mistakes that were mental errors."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.