"One of the craziest games I've ever been a part of," said Sherri Coale after the game. "Complete role reversal from one half to the other."

Which is probably why upset-trackers who went out to the movies after #9 Cal had built a 26-point halftime lead on #5 Oklahoma spit out their popcorn when they saw the finally score: 86-75, Sooners.

"Finishing is the thing we wanted to improve on," said Coach Boyle after the game. "I told them in the locker room, I've never lost a [26 point] lead as a coach. I keep asking myself, how did I not do my job to prepare them in that situation. That's on me. You have to have guard play at the end of a game. Our guards are good. For whatever reason, they were tentative. We didn't do the easy things. We made it all so much more difficult on ourselves. We were looking at each other to make plays instead of playing together. What we did in the first half was be aggressive. They were aggressive in the second half. We weren't."

Said Coale:

"I thought they were fabulous in the first half, almost played fabulously, about as perfectly as you can play," Coale said. "And we didn't, obviously. We couldn't make shots, didn't really have the aggression that we needed. Second half, I was really proud of our kids for not panicking, first of all, and for playing every possession as if it was the one that would win the game. It takes a certain amount of maturity, a certain amount of character to do that."