Cardinal prove resilient again in trying season

Tara VanDerveer sat at the press conference table, analyzing the box score, while an alarm blared behind her and an announcement boomed over the loudspeaker that there was a fire in the Alamodome, and the building was being evacuated.

The perfect picture of Stanford’s 202021 season.

While chaos raged around the team for months, the Cardinal stayed focused on the task at hand. Tuesday night’s Elite Eight game was no different. In a season where

battling through obstacles was the key to survival, Stanford found new resiliency.

Once again, the Cardinal had to overcome something they had never experienced.

Not coronavirus tests, not being evicted from Maples Pavilion or wandering the Western United States for weeks. This was not pandemic resilience.

This was pure basketball toughness.

Down 14 in the first half, the Cardinal’s biggest deficit of the season, Stanford roared back in the second half to defeat Louisville by 15, 7863.

A 29point swing in an Elite Eight game?

That’s a lot of damn resilience.

“Sometimes you have to go through adversity,” VanDerveer said. “And we’ve been going through adversity all season.”

But this was a different kind of adversity, against a determined Louisville team that jumped on Stanford early and kept the Cardinal off balance, forced into bad shot selection and fully discombobulated. Hours before a fire in the concession stand set off the building alarms (and was quickly put out), Louisville was on fire.

Louisville presented the kind of ordeal Stanford had not had to face this season. The Cardinal have only lost twice, once in overtime to Colorado and once to UCLA. They had never battled back from a huge deficit for a win.

But all the weirdness and struggle and discomfort of recent months helped Stanford to focus.

“Be where your feet are.” That’s what fifthyear senior Anna Wilson tells her younger teammates. Stay in the moment. Don’t feel pressure, instead focus on opportunity. Enjoy the experience.

And despite looking rattled, outofsync and increasingly desperate in the first half, as the team struggled to shoot and senior standout Kiana Williams was tight and ineffective, Stanford regrouped.

At halftime, VanDerveer lit into them.

“I didn’t recognize the people in the jerseys in the first half,” VanDerveer said. “We were getting pummeled.”

Sometime between the second and third quarters, the Cardinal players remembered who they were: the tournament’s overall No. 1 seed. They remembered what they had been through on this journey to get to this quarterfinal game in San Antonio.

They tapped into their resiliency.

And they tapped into their defense.

And, as VanDerveer said, they “just relaxed and played.”

Particularly Williams, the San Antonio native who has been gifted tickets by her teammates so she can bring as many family members as possible into the building.

“I just had to change my mentality,” she said after the game, dropping an expletive on ESPN. “I was forcing things. I think I wanted it too bad.”

Ashten Prechtel, the sophomore who came off the bench to score 16 secondhalf points and lead the comeback, said it crossed her mind that Stanford’s amazing, unique, difficult season could be over.

“We realized this could be our last game,” she said. “We didn’t want to go home.”

Stanford won’t go home. The team has been on the road and isolated for most of the past five months, so what’s another six days? The Cardinal will face South Carolina, the team it lost to in the 2017 Final Four, on Friday night.

Stanford outscored Louisville by 27 points in the second half. Williams finally got her shots to fall, and her face lit up with the familiar smile.

“I’m just so proud of this team,” she said. “We’ve been through so much . ... I want two more games for this team.”

They’ve got at least one — the 14th Final Four of VanDerveer’s career. In her long career, she has seen a lot of ups and downs. She has seen everything the game can offer.

And now she’s witnessed a comeback for the ages, by a team able to rally and focus in the midst of chaos.

Just like it has been all year.