RALEIGH, N.C. — RALEIGH, N.C. -The box score will forever show that Marissa Coleman lit up the scoreboard like a fireworks celebration. Highlights will prove she did what no Maryland player before her managed to do. And history will remember that she carried her team into the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament.
But what Coleman did Saturday afternoon is hard to quantify with numbers and difficult to capture with cameras. She could've started flapping her arms at midcourt and floated to the rafters and it would have been easier to rationalize than the closing minutes of Maryland's emotional 78-74 come-from-behind win over Vanderbilt.
The tournament buzz will focus on Coleman's 42 points - a career high, a school record and the fifth-most in tournament history - plus those 15 rebounds. But that's only part of the story. Coleman didn't propel the top-seeded Terps into Monday's showdown with third seed Louisville solely by scoring.
A television timeout was called with 6:59 remaining in the game. Maryland trailed 66-57. Coleman walked up to coach Brenda Frese in the huddle and said, "Coach B, I'm guarding 34."
Christina Wirth, the Commodores' No. 34, already had 22 points. Frese had tried using Lynetta Kizer and Dee Liles, but Wirth kept firing. Never before this season has Coleman requested such an assignment, and truth be told, Frese has better defenders. But when the senior raised her hand, the coach didn't hesitate. "OK," Frese told her.
"I just knew that as a senior, she was not going to let her college career end," Frese explained later. "If she was asking for it, then she really wanted it."
The game was about to swing wildly on this matchup between the game's leading scorers. Wirth missed her final four field-goal attempts, and Coleman scrambled on both ends like a player possessed. She was on top of every play, so close to the action you would think she had the basketball on a yo-yo string.
Wirth was like everyone else in the arena, relegated to spectator status for the hottest show in sneakers.
At the 4:28 mark, the Terps trailed by nine. In less than a minute, Coleman scored seven unanswered points and turned what had once been an 18-point Vanderbilt lead into a one-possession game.
Before anyone could catch her breath, Kristi Toliver hit a streaking Liles with a bounce pass. Liles' layup with 2:07 left gave the Terps their first lead of the game. Wirth later hit a couple of free throws to tie it, but with 27.9 seconds remaining, Coleman made a pull-up jumper in the paint. The basket made it 76-74 and kept alive the Terps' title dreams.
