PORTLAND, Me- The Maine Black Bears held the UNH Wildcats to 29 percent shooting on Sunday afternoon, and Blanca Millan had another solid game with 16 points and eight rebounds to lead Maine to a 64-48 win in the America East semifinals at the Cross Insurance Arena.
The win advances Maine (22-9) to the conference championship game next Friday at 4 p.m. against Hartford (19-12), which upset Albany 58-56 in Sunday’s second semifinal. Maine is the highest seed so the game will be played at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. Maine won both meetings with the Hawks in the regular season.
UNH shot just 3-17 in the opening quarter, as Maine held a 15-6 lead after the first 10 minutes. Maine increased the lead to 19-6 in the second quarter, before an 8-1 run cut the lead to 20-14. Maine scored 11 of the final 18 points of the second and led at the half by 10 at 31-21.
Maine would grab their biggest lead of the game by jumping on UNH out of the locker room at the start of the second half. A 9-1 spurt made it 40-22, before UNH cut back it down to 12 with a 6-0 run of their own holding the Black Bears scoreless for four minutes. Maine would up the lead again, and built the advantage to 47-28 at the end of the third quarter, and led by as many as 23 in the final quarter. UNH never got closer than 14 the rest of the way ending their season at 19-12 as the #5 conference seed.
Along with Millan, Maine also got contributions from Tanesha Sutton, who had 14 points and six rebounds. Parise Rossignol added 13 points. Julie Brosseau chipped in seven points and six rebounds, and Dor Saar also had seven with five assists. “It’s pretty surreal. I mean a year ago I was watching them do this. Being back is pretty special, I don’t take it for granted and I’m enjoying every moment,” said Rossignol.
Rossignol, who had a career high in the Saturday quarterfinal win over UMBC with 15 points, added another big 13 points to help the Black Bears Sunday. “Yeah definitely that’s huge. I think at the beginning of the season I wasn’t super confident with it, but my teammates and coaches just told me to keep shooting and I have this whole season. I have gotten more and more confident as the year has gone on. So I am happy to have them help me with that,” added Rossignol.
UNH was led by senior guard Brittni Lai who had 17 points. Kat Fogarty added 12 points and 10 rebounds, while Carlie Pogue chipped in 10 points and 11 rebounds. UNH, who scored 30 points in the paint Saturday against Stony Brook was held to just eight on Sunday. “So we started off the game switching it up between a zone and a man (defense). Our philosopy was if they were gonna beat us, we wanted them to beat us from the outside,” said Maine head coach Amy Vachon. Vachon added, “Yeah it’s gonna be nice to be at home. It is really hard to play a championship game on the road. We are very excited and looking forward to it.”
“It’s just really tough. They are just a really good team. We watched alot of film. We watched their game yesterday, watched the last time we played them. We kept saying we gotta get out. We can’t give up those shots to Millan, and on the offensive end we can’t settle for contested jumpers cause they will run out. So that was a bit frustrating. We went from shooting almost 50 percent yesterday to 29 percent today, and sure some of that was fatigue. It was just a tough day. Maine did what Maine does, they made open shots. Soon as we started to feel good, they would make a run of their own,” said UNH head coach Maureen Magarity.
UNH 6 15 7 20- 48
UME 15 16 16 17- 64
Rebounds- UNH 32 Maine 37
Foul shots- UNH 12-18 Maine 10-12
Turnovers- UNH 13 Maine 14
