A DEFENSELESS EXIT

SPOKANE, Wash. - There will be no national championship for this Terrapin women's basketball team.

No trip to Tampa for the Final Four. No new banner in the Comcast Center rafters.

The Terps ran into a streaking Stanford team that seemingly could not miss last night, and lost the Spokane regional final 98-87, bringing a very promising season to an abrupt end.

"Sometimes it's just not your day," coach Brenda Frese said. "They continued to hit big shot after big shot, and really played poised for a complete 40 minute game."

Both teams came out firing from the beginning, and the Cardinal simply never cooled off.

The Cardinal had the athleticism to run up-and-down with the Terps, and it seemed like nothing the Terps did defensively would slow its attack.

Cardinal senior guard Candice Wiggins scored 41 points, and the team shot 14-for-28 from 3-point range.

"It wasn't even the lack of our defensive effort," junior guard Kristi Toliver said. "They were just flat out knocking the ball down."

On the other end, the Cardinal did well limiting Terp senior forward Crystal Langhorne in the low post in her last collegiate game, immediately double- and sometimes triple-teaming her as soon as she touched the ball.

The Terps had to rely on outside shooting for most of their scoring, and couldn't keep up despite shooting better than 54 percent from the field.

The Terps' play on the perimeter, led by a career high 35-point performance from Toliver, allowed them to keep it close. But the Cardinal always seemed to have an answer.

"They were long enough to be able to disrupt what was going on down low," Toliver said. "As guards we kind of had to step it up a little bit. But it wasn't our offense. We were scoring."

The Terps shot 64.3 percent from the field in the first half but still trailed 51-41 at halftime as Wiggins and sophomore guard JJ Hones each had 17 points for the Cardinal.

The Cardinal had shot 61.3 percent from the floor in the first half and 66.7 percent from behind the arc.

"They're just so dangerous when they're hitting threes," Frese said. "We really felt like we wanted to stick to our gameplan and that eventually those shots weren't going to continue to fall."

The pace slowed considerably early in the second half, and both teams' shooting did begin to cool off.

The Terps cut the lead to five, but the Cardinal quickly regained its stroke and went back up 64-51 with 13:33 remaining.

To make matters worse, the Cardinal was able to get sophomore forward Jayne Appel going in the low post, establishing an inside presence after relying mostly on the lights-out outside shooting in the first half.

"I wanted to keep Jayne in there and [have her] get good position in the post," Cardinal coach Tara VanDerveer said.

After Appel drew a foul on senior forward Jade Perry about midway through the second half, a frustrated Frese drew a technical for stomping her foot and vociferously arguing the call.

The Terps trailed by 15 after Wiggins made the two free throws after the technical, and things started to unravel.

Toliver tried to will the Terps back into it late, at one point scoring 11 consecutive Terp points. But the Cardinal fittingly made too many big shots down the stretch for the Terps to come back.

"We dug ourselves in a hole early, and we were trying to fight and come out of that for the entire game," Frese said.

Tears began to flow on both sides as time ran out.

Wiggins collapsed to the floor in jubilation, and a few Terps couldn't even bear to stay on the court long enough for the postgame handshake.

"I'm stunned, speechless," senior forward Laura Harper said. "I can't believe these aren't my teammates anymore."

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