The game is over, but the autopsy will linger.

South Carolina women’s basketball suffered an 87-58 loss to UConn on Sunday, its worst home loss since 2008. The game was over before the midway point of the second quarter, fans were streaming for the exits in the third quarter and at times it felt like a fever dream, the type of game that exists in a coach’s head for a worst case scenario but you would never actually conceive of on the court.

“There is no trying to find a silver lining to it,” a dejected Dawn Staley said. “We got beat, and we got beat pretty bad.”

The details are mostly irrelevant, but still jarring. UConn (24-3) more than doubled up South Carolina (23-3) in offensive rebounds, more than tripled it in assists and made more than four times as many 3-pointers. It was a nuclear meltdown, a game so bad it would be foolish to point to one culprit or single out one scapegoat.

South Carolina could have lost by 10, 20, 30 or 130 points and the vibes would have been the same. This was all about the effort — which Staley graded as an “F” — the toughness and a complete inability to stop anything on the defensive end, inside or out.

“It was just a major implosion for us,” Staley said. “You can pull out a lot of different stats, and they’re all going to end the same way. We did not perform well in any area that was great.”

Losing happens. Last week at Texas was the type of loss that “happens” over the course of a tight season, a coin flip game which landed on the wrong side.

Getting humiliated is another, and it is something this program truly has not had since it built itself into its current apparatus. They have been popped a few times, sure. But not by this many, not on their home floor, not in such a high-profile game with a national audience and College GameDay in town.

“We just got punked today,” Te-Hina Paopao. “It’s very much embarrassing. That’s not who we are. It was very much self-inflicted as well.”

It is hard to know what the next steps are, because they have never really had to walk them. Maybe in terms of a practice schedule or installing a scouting report, moving on from a four-point loss and a 29-point loss could be the same.

But mentally, where do they even go from here? At this point, Staley is far too deep in her career and this team is too deep into its season to reinvent the wheel. With four games left in the regular season, you are who you are. Up until Sunday, you could chalk all of South Carolina’s issues up to minor faults.

They’ve struggled to defend elite centers at times, but who doesn’t? The offense has had some lulls in games, but never an outright faceplant. The defense has not been perfect, but nobody would even think to question the effort. They were all chinks in the armor that took them off the pedastal of invincibility, but nowhere near actual existential concerns.

Now they have careened over that cliff. Not to the point where the season is irredeemable, but definitely to the soul-searching stage.

“A loss like this is about toughness,” Staley said. “A loss like this isn’t about anything besides getting our players to keep the main thing the main thing. Obviously when you lose like this, something else is going on that isn’t just about basketball. So we’ve got to figure that out and get back on it.”

A feeling of unfamiliarity will hover around the program for the next few days. Nobody on this roster has ever lost a home game, and none of them have lost such a lopsided game anywhere. The Gamecocks have already responded well from both losses this season, but nothing like this.

“We let them [players] talk about what took place,” Staley said. “They said all the right things, and it wasn’t sugar coated. We definitely have to get better, and we will.”

If this South Carolina team is going to get where it wants to go, today has to be rock bottom.

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