GREENVILLE, S.C. — Call it the Kamilla Thrilla.
Staring directly down the barrel of its first loss of the season, it would not be an exaggeration to say South Carolina women’s basketball needed a miracle.
Tennessee was up two, at the free throw line with under four seconds left.
Clank. Clank.
Oxygen.
A Tennessee foul with 1.1 seconds left to force one final prayer of an inbounds play.
Literally, a prayer.
“I honestly don’t really remember,” guard Bree Hall said on her feelings in the moment. “I was just praying that we won.”
Kamilla Cardoso, with one whole 3-point attempt in her entire college career — a 2020 airball with 15 seconds left in a 24-point Syracuse loss at North Carolina — popped out behind the line and launched a heave.
If it were any other team, you would be stunned by the result. This banked in buzzer-beater to give South Carolina a 74-73 win and a spot in Sunday’s title game was still shocking, but almost felt like par for the course for this group.
“I really wanted Pao to be in the position to catch and shoot,” Dawn Staley said. “They did a great job on Pao all night long. I was skeptical about giving her the ball. I just told Raven to throw it high to Kamilla. Kamilla passed it to Pao. I'm like, ‘No, they're not going to let Pao get any daylight at the end.’ I yelled at Kamilla, said, ‘Shoot it. I added some more words to that, but I can't say it right here.”
That South Carolina (31-0) was even in position to need such heroism was an issue itself, as the Gamecocks let a 23-point lead slowly drip away into a Tennessee lead with 24.5 seconds remaining. It was as brutal a stretch as this still unblemished team has had all year, losing poise on offense while Rickea Jackson danced and dashed everywhere she wanted on South Carolina’s defense.
An 11-1 Tennessee (19-12) run going into halftime got the game back in striking distance, and it was a slow burn from there as grains of sand continued tumbling out of the hour glass. This game constinuted a straight up staredown with defeat, a 13-day reckoning with a loss before the NCAA Tournament opener looming.
The notion of Cardoso of all people hitting that particular shot just beore the clock struck midnight was absurd, a perfect slot machine confluence of events any regular in Las Vegas would dream of.
"I was so shocked,” Raven Johnson said. “She's never shot a 3 before. When she shot the 3 I was like, 'What in the world? This is crazy.' I was so excited for her, just to see her have that confidence to shoot the 3, and that just tells you about the work she put in the off-season and the work she put into her shot, because she was so confident shooting that shot.”
Lessons from the close shave were clear, streaking through the faces of everyone in the locker room. There were comments about undisciplined defense. More than one player mentioned taking their foot off the gas after rocketing out to a 35-12 lead.
Conventional wisdom — and perhaps a little bit too long of a memory from last year — has been about how a loss would be good for these Gamecocks. Thoughts about how the 2022 team lost in the SEC Tournament before reeling off six traight NCAA Tournament victories for a National Championship, and about how last year’s group blitzed through its first 36 games only to suffer its one and only loss in the Final Four.
Regardless of whether South Carolina “needed” a loss, or whether it still could get one in Sunday’s championship game, Saturday may have been the best of both worlds. Several months of Staley preaching about how her young team has learned lessons in winning almost turned into a first foray into the other side of the coin, but not quite.
The first part still holds, though.
Honestly, I didn't want to lose,” Johnson said. “I was just thinking about winning. Just gave me a flashback of last year. I didn't want to go through that again.”
And while it did not get the lesson in a loss, it got the experience of an unlikely win, of just how narrow the margins are in March and tested a little bit of the late-game mettle it requires to pull out a win it really only had to brush off at LSU.
South Carolina started at the edge of the cliff, dropped nine out of ten toes over the edge and somehow, someway cartwheeled back out of the abyss onto safe ground for another day.
Even if the shot itself was not lucky — assistant coach Lisa Boyer has the post players work on outside shots after every practice just in case of a similar situation — it was, even to the most opportunistic of Gamecocks, a fortuitous way to win.
"Don't get in that predicament again,” Ashlyn Watkins said was her takeaway from Saturday. “We've just got to execute and play as a team defensively and offensively."
They got the euphoria of a win, and the fear of a loss all in one swig.
Not bad for a game which looked over in the first five minutes.
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