CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - The Alana Beard-less Blue Devils didn't have to be perfect to win after all.
Sheana Mosch just had to come awful close.
The sophomore shooting guard scored a game-and career-high 25 points, lifting the No. 4 Blue Devils (18-1, 6-1 in the ACC) to a scrappy 71-68 victory over No. 25 Virginia (13-7, 4-3) in the team's first game without their primary offensive weapon, Beard, who remains sidelined with a dislocated thumb.
"The team that walked in here was the same team that won the ACC championship last year," said Virginia coach Debbie Ryan, who saw her team lose in University Hall for just the fourth time in 22 series contests. "I wasn't thinking about them as a team without Beard. They were actually a better team tonight than they had been all year."
Better, but almost not good enough to pick up their ninth straight win of the season.
A 10-foot jumper by Schuye LaRue with 2:05 to play capped off a furious 6-0 Virginia run, returning the Cavaliers the lead they enjoyed most of the night at 66-65 and setting up the Blue Devils for a second straight loss in Charlottesville. But a rejuvenated Iciss Tillis, who rediscovered her touch from the floor after a terrible 2-14 start, hit a short turnaround jumper and scored off her own miss on the next possession to give the Blue Devils a quick 4-0 run and just enough breathing room they needed to squeak out a victory high on drama but low on aesthetics.
"I felt like if we could hang in there, we could go on
Fittingly enough, it was Mosch who iced the game with 18 seconds to play, nailing a floating jumper over Anna Prillaman as the shot clock hit zero.
"I felt comfortable with the ball in my hand tonight," said Mosch, who eclipsed her previous season high of 14 against the Penn State Nittany Lions and seemingly had little trouble pushing her way through an otherwise tough Virginia defense.
With the Cavaliers clamping down on returning ACC player of the year Georgia Schweitzer-she scored just one basket in the second half after 15 first-half points-Mosch almost single-handedly kept the Blue Devils in the game.
She missed just one shot in the second half and rarely had to shoot from beyond four feet as she routinely outpaced the Virginia defense on her career night, more than making up for an out-of-sync game by her teammates, who barely shot over 25 percent from the floor.
"We didn't do a good job in transition, defense especially," said Ryan, whose Cavaliers have now lost two of its last three conference games. "Mosch was able to sneak in and get a few baskets."
Yet Mosch's heroics alone weren't enough.
A pair of blocks of Cavalier three-pointers by Schweitzer, who had just one block all season before last night's contest, and a dozen points by Tillis-who with Mosch scored 28 of the team's 35 second half points-helped stave off Virginia, who held the led for all but 1:51 of the first 32 minutes.
"I felt good about the game until the end," Ryan said. "Then they blocked a couple threes, changed around a bit. I felt good about the game until the last [two minutes]."
Virginia was further handicapped by an awful outing by its star LaRue. The ACC's second-leading scorer was out of sync all night, hitting just 5-of-17 shots against a Duke defense designed to stop her.
"We knew they averaged six threes a game, we knew they were going to get six threes," said Goestenkors. "But usually they get 24 from LaRue too. We wanted to shut down one or the other."
And although the Cavaliers nailed seven threes in the opening half-led by Svetlana Volnaya's four-Virginia hit just 2-of-7 in the decisive second half.
The win marks a solid beginning to one of the toughest stretches of the year for the Blue Devils, who this week still have to face North Carolina on the road and No. 20 Clemson still without Beard, who isn't expected to play until the second week of February.
And unlike a year ago when the Blue Devils had to recover from the loss of senior captain Peppi Browne, Goestenkors leaves Charlottesville regrouping, not revamping.
"The win [without Alana] means a great deal," Goestenkors said. "We talked about how adversity makes a team. Last year [without Peppi] the character we saw was not that of a champion. We're a year older, a year wiser and it was good to see we were a year tougher."
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