DALLAS —
One streak fell on Friday. Another extended on Sunday.
Mississippi State fell for the 11th straight time to South Carolina in a 67-55 loss in the national championship game Sunday evening in the American Airlines Center. The Bulldogs have still not beaten the Gamecocks in the Vic Schaefer era, including three losses to South Carolina this season.
Mississippi State looked gassed, both emotionally and physically. They also looked like players who couldn’t shake from their psyches the name on the front of their opponents’ jerseys.
South Carolina, by contrast, looked like a team that knew it would win when the players walked onto the court.
The championship game looked much like what many expected Friday’s semifinal against Connecticut to be.
Mississippi State showed flashes in the first half. The Bulldogs opened on a 7-1 run and the largely contained hero of Friday, Morgan William, scored six of her total eight points of the title game in the second quarter.
By the third, when MSU had fallen behind by 14 points, even those flashes seemed to be gone.
Then the giant slayers made two scrappy runs, in each the third and fourth quarter, that cut the South Carolina lead to four, brought the legion of Bulldog fans in the arena to their feet and rang reminiscent of what this team has been all year.
But it was too little, too late.
NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player A’Ja Wilson scored six straight points late in the fourth to swell the South Carolina’s lead to 66-52. Soon after, Coach Schaefer pulled his teary-eyed seniors from the floor so they could receive their last standing ovations of their college careers.
In the locker room, the Bulldogs mourned the loss, the season’s end. They cried, hugged each other and treated the moment almost like a funeral visitation.
The slate of players who will return next season, though they said it tearfully, also expressed something a little more hopeful: “We’ll be back.”
Unfortunately, the four seniors on this team won’t be. But they shouldn’t let their grief deny them, as they hang up their jerseys for the last time, the satisfaction of being the winningest class in program history and being members of the first team in program history to play for a national championship.
They should also be satisfied they are leaving the program far better than they found it upon arriving in Starkville four years ago. And they should take a deep amount of pride that the players to whom they now hand the baton look to be every bit good for their word.
They very well could be back. But as the old saying goes, “If you want to be the best, you must beat the best.” In those terms, they have to, at some point, find a way to get past South Carolina.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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