Up until about 10 years ago, NCAA Tournament appearances were a given for the program.

On Wednesday, the competition was a step down – the first round of the National Invitational Tournament.

But in blowing out Boise State 92-66, the Lady Griz emphatically kept their season going by running the 21-win Broncos off of Robin Selvig Court.

Senior Maggie Espenmiller-McGraw, clearly reveling in one more chance to play at home, scored 20 points for Montana, which made 15 of 25 3-point attempts and scored 46 points in each half en route to an eye-catching rout.

It was Montana’s first win in a national postseason tournament since 2014, two years before Selvig’s retirement, when the Lady Griz beat Washington State in the WNIT.

“I think this was a big stepping stone for the teams to come after this,” Espenmiller-McGraw said. “And I think we’re kind of just trying to set that expectation that we are a top contender in the Big Sky and hopefully, the next teams that come will be able to do even better than we did.”

Last week’s loss to Northern Arizona in the semifinals of the Big Sky Tournament ended the major part of Montana’s season, extending an NCAA Tournament drought that stretches back to 2015.

With that pressure removed and a week to re-focus on the bonus opportunity of the WNIT, the Lady Griz came out fast and loose on Wednesday.

Gina Marxen, Espenmiller-McGraw, Mack Konig, Dani Bartsch and Macey Huard all made 3-pointers in the first quarter. Montana led 21-18 after the first and 46-39 at halftime, making 10 of 15 3-point attempts in the first 20 minutes.

“I think we played with a little more freedom,” UM head coach Brian Holsinger said. “Obviously, being at home makes a big difference. But we played looser, and we looked like we were having a little more fun. We didn’t look so tight, and as a coach you’re like, how do I repeat that for all the games?”

Facing Boise State’s two-post lineup, the Lady Griz pressed the Broncos for most of the game, forcing 18 turnovers and blunting the impact of bigs Abby Muse and Elodie Lalotte, who combined for 11 points on 14 shots.

“They’re very traditional,” Holsinger said. “It’s funny, in the Big Sky, we play mostly one post with guards around, and they play with two posts. I’m like, well, if you’re gonna play two posts, let’s make the other post make a play. So they end up having to totally recreate their transition offense and bring guards up. I think it gave us a little bit of a lift because it put them on their heels for a second.”

After Carmen Gfeller’s layup to start the third quarter, Montana led by double digits for almost the entire second half. Boise State never cut the lead under eight points after halftime, and the Lady Griz put a final statement on the game by outscoring the Broncos 20 to 6 in the fourth quarter.

The 92 points were the most ever scored in a postseason tournament by the Lady Griz as Holsinger’s team showed off its full offensive potential with Gfeller’s interior scoring and Konig’s driving opening up cracks in the defense that manifested in increasingly wide-open 3-pointers for Espenmiller-McGraw and Montana’s other shooters.

Konig and Macey Huard each had 16 points, and Gfeller and Gina Marxen had 14 apiece. Marxen added nine assists, one off her season high.

“I love playing with her,” Espenmiller-McGraw said about Marxen. “She might be one of my favorite people, on the court and off the court. And, you know, it’s just so fun playing with her. She’s such a good passer.”

Montana now advances to play North Dakota State, with the date and venue for that game still to be announced.

Montana’s third-year head women’s basketball coach had to ditch his black sport coat and his maroon button down because each was soaking wet. He was delayed a bit because he had to soak in the celebration not only with his team but also a group of “about 15 or 20” former Lady Griz players who descended upon the Montana locker room after a rivalry win that’s one of the biggest of Holsinger’s short yet conversation-sparking tenure as UM’s head coach.

Sometimes, you get to take a bath when you thoroughly dominate your rival for one of the signature wins leading a prestigious program like the Lady Griz.

“Apologies for being late, but we had a bunch of Lady Griz alumni and they are more important than every body else,” Holsinger said with a smile while addressing the media in the Western Auxilary Gym at the Adams Center with his wife and children looking on. “One of the reasons I took this job was because of them.

“We had a good number of them, 15 or 20 alums, in the locker room so I apologize for being late. We wanted to make them proud and today we made them proud, so that’s the best part of this.”

Holsinger has assembled a beautifully talented roster. This year’s group plays an entertaining brand of basketball, spreading the floor with more shooters than any team in the Big Sky Conference and showing the deft ability to share. And the Lady Griz have feasted on the bottom of the Big Sky, scoring more than 79 points on seven different occasions, including six times against the teams in 5^th through 10^th place in the Big Sky standings.

But against the best teams in the league, the uber-talented Lady Griz have come up short, save for an 89-84 win at Northern Arizona January 13. In the first matchups this year against the ‘Cats in Bozeman, Eastern Washington in Cheney and a home loss to NAU on February 8, Montana’s scoring droughts looked as much like mental meltdowns than poor offensive execution.

Simply put, could the Lady Griz figure out a way to out-tough their opponents? Or would the wins come only when the shots fell?

Perhaps the best example of Montana’s emotional roller coaster came in Bozeman last month. The Lady Griz stormed to a 21-6 lead only to lose 64-55 as the Bobcats turned the game into an old-fashioned street fight.

This time around against the rival, Montana never faltered, instead showing a consistency that, if sustained, makes the Lady Griz a true contender to win the Big Sky Tournament in Boise next month.

“I told the pep rally last night, these guys are fun to watch,” Holsinger said. “This is women’s basketball at its finest, to be honest. We are one of the best 3-point shooting teams in the country. Who doesn’t like a 3-pointer? Everyone gets excited.

It’s a matter of opinion to say Saturday was Montana’s most complete effort as a team. But it’s hard to argue it was as sustained an effort as the team has had the last few months. The win included one of the best closing periods of the conference slate.

Montana State entered the game tied with UM for third in the Big Sky standings at 8-4 and owned the head to head. The Bobcats had won 11 of 13 in the rivalry and last year’s MSU win in Missoula almost certainly lingered in the back of Montana’s collective minds.

In Bozeman earlier this season, Montana raced to a 21-6 lead by shooting the lights out of Brick Breedin Fieldhouse in the first quarter. Then Montana State locked in and locked down, dominating the game physically and on the glass.

“This is what I mean with a team maturing,” Holsinger said. “You learn from moments like that on the road.

“We’ve learned. I think that’s the key to this whole thing. You get as much talent as you can and you keep learning and learning and learning. We’ve developed a better identity offensively and we don’t let those ebbs and flows affect us like we did earlier in the season.”

On Saturday, Dani Bartsch dished out of the high post to Gina Marxen for a pair of corner 3-pointers to close the first quarter as UM hit four triples in the first quarter.

Unlike in Bozeman, UM had no sort of meltdown. Instead, Montana looked like the veteran, deep team flushed wit home-grown products like super senior Carmen Gfeller, standout Holsinger recruits like sophomore point guard Mack Konig and freshman wing Haley Huard plus stud transfers like Marxen (formerly All-Big Sky at Idaho) and Maggie Espenmiller-McGraw, a starters as a freshman at Iowa State before injuries derailed her career.

Plus, the Lady Griz have Bartsch, a former Montana Gatorade Player of the Year from Helena and one of the most versatile, uniquely gifted athletes in the conference.

Montana shot 48 percent from the floor, including hitting 14 of its 27 3-point attempts. Bartsch, Marxen and Konig all scored 14 points while Espenmiller-McGraw scored 12. Gfeller didn’t take a shot in the first half but finished with nine points plus two crucial offensive rebounds that ignited a run to end the third quarter that proved to be decisive.

“There’s always going to be cold stretches but when your defense is off like ours was today and you make the 3-ball a rhythm look like it was today, they will knock it down,” Binford said. “Now, credit them. They moved the ball efficiently (18 assists). They knew where we were going to be attacking from to get us in those positions.”

Montana State won the Big Sky regular-season crown in 2019-2020 and last season. The Bobcats advanced to the NCAA Tournament in 2022. They did it with a consistent, temperate style reflective of their head coach.

MSU remains a model program in the Big Sky. Binford has proven she can recruit, develop, employ and graduate great groups and then find ways to replace them. She did it when Jasmine Hommes, Peyton Ferris and Lindsay Stockton helped the ‘Cats advance to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1992 in 2017.

Binford and a group led by Fallyn Freije went 19-1 in league play three years later only to have the Big Dance called off due to Covid. Three years after that, Darian White and Kola Bad Bear led Montana State back to March Madness.

MSU is in the mix yet again even though White is playing her fifth year at Nebraska, Bad Bear is a super senior at Montana State-Billings and senior post Lexi Deden is riding the bench because of a blown knee. MSU’s a core of freshmen and sophomores have bought into Binford’s aggressive defensive philosophies and the youth combined with the defensive fortitude will make the Bobcats a headache in Boise.

“It’s going to be really hard to beat us if we play our game for 40 minutes but I don’t think we did that tonight,” MSU sophomore Marah Dykstra

The Lady Griz certainly did play their games. On Saturday, there was no question who was the more complete, talented, deep team on the court. And for the first time in quite some time, that team was not Montana State.

That is worth an ice bath and an outfit change, if you ask Holsinger.

“It was the whole staff (that got doused in water),” Holsinger said while wearing a hooded Lady Griz sweatshirt in place of his soaked work clothes.

“I expect to win. Sometimes, I think, ‘I don’t need a bath, we were supposed to win.’ Right? But at the same time, you want to celebrate. These guys have worked their butts off. They grind away. So to have some fun, let’s have some fun. They had lots of fun.”

A minute or so later, Holsinger was gone, patting freshman Macey Huard on the back as he and his team walked off the court at Brick Breeden Fieldhouse.

The story of Saturday’s game was the resilience of Binford’s Montana State team, exemplified by how they closed out the final 30 seconds of the game after a scary neck injury to senior KJ Limardo.

The surreality surrounding Limardo’s awful fall, which caused a near-20-minute delay as paramedics attended to her in a chillingly quiet Worthington Arena, hung over the final ticks of the clock, which saw Bobcats senior Madison Hall hit four free throws and freshman Natalie Picton add two more to close out a 64-55 win.

It also obscured another meltdown in Bozeman for the Lady Griz as their losing streak in their rival’s circular house of horrors reached a full decade – a run that’s encompassed the final two seasons of legend Robin Selvig’s coaching career, all four of Shannon Schweyen’s and one of Mike Petrino’s and now the first three of Holsinger’s.

“I don’t have a lot to say, honestly,” Holsinger said. “Completely disappointed in my team and our team’s effort the whole game, you know, and give credit to Montana State. … Really disappointing game for us.”

After pushing Montana State – which went on to win a share of the conference title – to the wire with a furious late run in a 75-73 loss a year ago, it appeared things were lining up for the Lady Griz to end the run this season.

In each of their previous two tries, Montana played well in stretches but was clearly a level or two below an experienced, businesslike Bobcats team led by all-conference stalwarts Darian White and Kola Bad Bear.

But this year, White and Bad Bear were gone, and Holsinger has assembled the talent-laden roster he’d been promising, meshing holdovers like Carmen Gfeller and Dani Bartsch, new recruits like Mack Konig and Macey Huard and transfers like Gina Marxen, Maggie Espenmiller-McGraw and MJ Bruno into a devastating, sharpshooting team. They opened the season with respectable losses to top-25 Gonzaga and Washington State and went on to start the conference season 3-1.

For the first seven minutes, that was the Lady Griz team that showed up to Bozeman on Saturday. Espenmiller-McGraw, Huard and Marxen all hit 3-pointers. Bartsch hit two, Binford took two timeouts in a desperate attempt to stop the barrage and Montana led 19-5 with three minutes, 23 seconds left in the first quarter.

“We definitely did not want to give them those rhythm 3s,” Binford said. “Because once you give them one, then that rim gets bigger. We had a really bad start, and I think I took two timeouts in one quarter. I’m like, ‘Okay, well, we’re stuck, they’ve got to play through it now, because I’m down to two timeouts.’ … Our kids kind of had to taper that down. We adjusted to how quick they can get these 3s off and tried to erase some of those and make them a little bit more rushed.”

The redemption narrative looked locked and loaded – but it didn’t hold for long. Montana State, pressuring the ball with live-wire freshman point guard Natalie Picton and taking away the easy 3s that Montana feasted on early, went on a 14-0 run over the end of the first quarter and the start of the second to tie it up at 19-all.

It was 29-25 Lady Griz at the half, but 44-41 Montana State after three quarters when Hall snuck behind the Montana defense for a crucial layup at the buzzer – and with the game close late, it was the old narrative that prevailed for the Lady Griz. Hall (Madison Jackson the last four seasons before getting married last off-season) finished with 18 points ad the fifth-year senior made play after play throughout the game.

After Bruno’s 3-pointer with 5:42 to go cut the Bobcats lead to 52-51, Montana didn’t make a single field goal the rest of the way.

Picton hit a crucial 3-pointer – her second of the quarter – and after Hall’s tough layup in the lane with under a minute left, Gfeller had a quality look for a 3 to tie from the top of the key but missed.

“We have a really good look at the end of the game to tie the game, and we don’t make it,” Holsinger said. “You have to make those, step up in those moments and make shots in games like this.”

Limardo chased down the rebound but fell awkwardly as Espenmiller-McGraw fouled her, leading to the scary scene and the drawn-out finish to the game (Montana State later gave a positive update on Limardo’s condition).

“We love KJ, our prayers are with her,” Binford said. “We’ve already got a ton of extended prayers, so we’re super grateful for that. Our thoughts are with her.”

After a near-tragedy like that, it’s hard to put any result into perspective. On the scoreboard, it was just another loss in a steadily mounting pile of them in this matchup for the Lady Griz.

But in the gym, it was the most galling of the three under Holsinger. The last two years, he’s been building a team. This year, it’s built – and in the fourth quarter in Bozeman, it still didn’t matter.

“To be honest, I wish I knew (what changed),” Holsinger said. “We came out playing right, and got tentative. And again, hats off to Montana State. They play aggressive, and so you want to give them credit. But something changed. … We came out the way I envisioned, and it went downhill. And, you know, I don’t necessarily know exactly what happened.”

BOZEMAN – Injuries and adversity have been the mark of this season for the Montana State women’s basketball team, but none have been as scary and emotional as the one suffered by Kaitlyn Limardo in the waning seconds of MSU’s 64-55 win over in-state rival Montana.

Limardo laid on the Grizzlies’ baseline for about 20 minutes before being taken off the floor with a backboard and gurney, and MSU clinging to a 58-55 lead with 14 seconds to play. Teammate Madison Jackson-Hall converted the foul shots and was fouled again, and once again made both.

“It’s really tough to see one of our key players go down,” said Jackson-Hall, who paced MSU with a game-high 18 points. “Especially KJ, because we’re all united as one. Just gotta keep moving on to the next game.”

Despite being short-handed, Montana State still found a way, rallying from an early 19-5 deficit to lock down the Lady Griz with physical, tough defense. And the effort, spearheaded by seniors Hall and Limardo, showed that Montana State — a team that has won 20 games each of the last three seasons and has won three regular-season Big Sky Conference titles in the last four years — still have hearts of champions.

The rivalry win is the 10th straight in Bozeman by MSU over Montana and the 13th victory by the Bobcats in the last 15 games against the Lady Griz overall.

“This team is very resilient as you see,” MSU head coach Trish Binford said. “I don’t know if I’ve had a closer team, and they continue to battle. There’s nothing more as a coach you can ask for from your kids. They trust and believe in each other.”

Injuries hampered the Bobcats before the season even started. MSU lost sophomore Dylan Philip, who was slated to take over the point guard spot vacated by all-time MSU great Darian White. That meant the Bobcats would go with true freshman Natalie Picton.

Picton rattled down a pair of three-pointers in the fourth quarter to spark the Bobcats on this day. She finished with 10 points and three assists. The team was plus-9 with the Ontario, Canada native on the floor, which matched the game-high.

“It started with our starting point guard, who’s started every single game for us this year,” Binford said of Picton. “Dylan was unavailable, and Natalie Picton is fearless and she’s going to do everything in her power for her teammates. She hit some big shots and she continues to grow.”

The Bobcats lost perhaps their best player in forward Lexi Deden just a few weeks into the season, then lost backup center Lindsey Hein just a couple weeks ago. Deden’s backup Marah Dykstra scored 12 points and grab five rebounds against Montana after returning from an injury herself.

Perhaps more importantly, Dykstra’s aggression to the hoop got UM All-Big Sky super senior forward Carmen Gfeller, who was averaging 13.3 points per game, into foul trouble. The Bobcats trailed 19-5 early but with Gfeller in-and-out all game they would outscore the Grizzlies 59-36 from late in the first quarter to the end of the game.

Through all that the Bobcats stand at 3-2 in the Big Sky and 9-9 overall.  The game was a statement win based on the postgame thoughts from head coach Trish Binford, Hall and Dykstra.

“I was telling coach, ‘I gotta be back for this game’,” Dykstra said. “Whatever it’s a time I gotta push. I was pushing myself. This is a really big game, not only a number on a stat sheet but this is an emotional win for us. I wanted to show out on my first game back that no team can step into the “Brick” and beat us.”

The win moves Montana State to 3-2 in league play, even with the Lady Griz in the Big Sky Conference standings, and 9-9 overall. Montana had won eight of nine and sat at 11-4 before the rivlary game.

“We got a lot to be proud of for this group from this game and we’re continuing to grow,” said Binford, who in her 19th season at the helm moved to 20-20 overall against Montana. “These kids are getting thrown in against an All-Big Sky post (Gfeller) and Natalie Picton going up against two starting point guards (Mack Konig is the UM’s starter, while Gina Marxen started at Idaho before transferring to UM).”

Montana State hopes to carry the momentum of this win – one that snapped a three-game losing streak – into its Monday road game in Pocatello against Idaho State.