That's the way they're supposed to play
52 points over last 14:01 brings Sooner women from 24 points down to a serious shot at victory inside packed house at seventh-ranked LSU

So here’s the deal.
Oklahoma was dead in the water.
Coach Jennie Baranczyk’s Sooner women were on their way to playing a similarly embarrassing game at LSU to the one they’d previously played at South Carolina.
In Columbia, they’d fallen 101-60.
So bad there, Baranczyk even stepped in with one of her ever-so-rare timeouts outside the final minute, her team trailing 58-29 with 6:48 remaining in the third quarter.
It didn’t work, the Sooners only continued to crater, eventually enduring a 79-40 deficit entering the fourth quarter.
Awful. Pathetic. Embarrassing.
In Baton Rouge Thursday night, in front of another huge and raucous crowd, OU went the other way.
You can even make a case it should have won the game.
We’ll get there.
First, consider this.
LSU took its biggest lead, 72-48, when Kailyn Gilbert, following Flau’jae Johnson’s offensive rebound of Mikaylah Williams’ 2-point miss, knocked down a 3-pointer with 4:13 remaining.
But the rest of the quarter, beginning with two free throws from Raegan Beers with 4:01 left in the frame, OU scored 20 points and 52 the rest of the game.
Can you believe it?
That’s 52 points in 14:01 off the clock.
Amazing. Impossible.
But it happened.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I knew what I’d be writing about it:
That the 13th-ranked Sooners (16-5, 4-4 SEC) had finally found themselves after screwing around since conference play began.
That, though they’d lost, it was finally a new day.
That, though the second-ranked Gamecocks (20-1, 8-0) and seventh-ranked Tigers (22-1, 7-1) may have the top two spots in the league locked down, the rest were up for grabs and, who knows, OU could still finish third.
Of course, that was all before the Sooners dang near won the stinkin’ game.
That’s because, on the heels of netting at least a single point over seven straight possessions and scoring 15 over the span, the last of them coming on a 3-pointer from Payton Verhulst, OU trailed 101-100 with 1:08 remaining.
All it might have taken was one more defensive rebound, but OU couldn’t get it after Williams, having already netted 34 points, missed from 3. Nor could it get it after Aneesah Morrow missed from close.
The next attempt, another 3-point try from Williams with 24 seconds remaining, ripped the cords and that was pretty much that.
LSU added three more points to forge the 107-100 final score, making the contest appear closer than it really became.
The turning point for the Sooners was the full-court pressure Baranczyk dialed up with less than half the third quarter still to play.
It wasn’t token pressure, but it wasn’t full-throttle, either. What it did, though, was force LSU to make passes on the move and receive them on the move and the Tigers couldn’t do it.
When they weren’t turning it over, they were hurrying and missing shots.
It also meant the Sooners were finally running off steals and misses and because they got used to doing that, off made Tiger baskets, too, all things a team must do if it’s to score 20 points in four minutes (or 4:01), which OU did.
Also …
The Sooners might have won if only they’d hit their free throws. Instead, they made 21 of 31, Zya Vann alone missing 4 of 6 in the third quarter, including three misses after the comeback began.
The Sooners might have won had Williams not enjoyed her career 37-point night, one that included 7-of-12 accuracy from beyond the 3-point arc.
Every good look, she buried.
The Sooners might have won, too, had they not been out-rebounded 14 to 9 on the offensive glass or not turned it over 23 times to the Tigers’ 19.
The rebounding issues hit Baranczyk and Verhulst hard, each of whom joined radio play-by-play man Brian Brinkley when it was over.
“I know I’m always going to replay that last play, where one possession, one rebound and it’s like …,” Verhulst said, not quite finishing the thought. “But I know it’s a full game.”
“We’ve also got to fight on the boards,” said Baranczyk. “That’s the one thing, and yes I’m proud of a lot of things but we have got to get back to rebounding the ball and we just had too many loose ones that they got to convert to points.”
OU led LSU in fast break points, 24 to 21, but LSU topped OU more handily in second-chance points, 20 to 13.
Verhulst went cold in the middle, but still netted 26 points behind 9-of-20 shooting, 3-of-9 3-point shooting and 5-of-6 foul shooting.
Beers soldiered through foul trouble to play 22 minutes and net 20 points on perfect 8-of-8 shooting and 4 of 6 foul shooting.
Vann committed five turnovers to go with her poor charity shooting, but also hit 4 of 6 shots and nabbed four steals, most of them in the second half of the third quarter and even finished plus 4 over her 20 minutes.
Lexi Keys added nine points on 3-of-5 3-point shooting, all of her makes coming in the space of five possessions during the Sooners’ torrid third-quarter sprint.
OU also played the way it played over the contest’s last 14 minutes without Nevaeh Tot playing any of it and Skylar Vann playing only a minute.
Tot was ill, Baranczyk said, as were Kiersten Johnson and Sahara Williams, though Williams was able to play through it effectively, scoring 10 of her 12 points after the half, while nabbing all three of her steals.
Mostly, rebounding aside, the Sooners finally looked like the best version of themselves after looking like the fifth-, sixth-, seventh- and eighth-best versions of themselves since conference play began.
Not even in their SEC victories had they played like the team they want and expect to be, or even like they know what a team like that might look like.
Yet, Thursday night in Louisiana, their coach called for a little pressure in a game they couldn’t possibly expect to get back into and they forgot to be afraid and almost won.
Deliverance.
Now they’ve got a chance.