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MORGANTOWN -- On February 23, 2001, West Virginia's women's basketball team suffered the indignation of having to endure a 100-28 defeat to a No. 1 Connecticut team that included Sue Bird and Swin Cash in a game played at Morgantown High due to the asbestos removal project at the Coliseum.
On Wednesday night, 22 years later, WVU finally got to know how UConn coach Geno Auremma's team felt that night as the Mountaineers pitched a first-quarter shutout en route to an 80-39 victory over Big 12 newcomer Houston.
Think about that, the fire-breathing WVU defense held Houston without a point for the first quarter of the game.
It was indignity dumped upon insult for Houston, being the first team ever in the history of the women's game at WVU that the Mountaineers had held a team scoreless for the first quarter.
Now it's true that for most of their history, they played the game like the men in halves, so it is uncertain if it has been done before. For example, in that 100-28 victory, WVU was held to 10 first-half points, which probably was a school record for the fewest points in a first half, perhaps breaking the record that had been set a month earlier when WVU scored 11 points at Connecticut in a 75-35 loss.
But this is a new WVU women's team, a ball-hawking, aggressive team playing under new coach Mark Kellogg, and instead of being the victim of Big East bullies, it is a bully in the ultra-tough Big 12 conference.
In fact, in that Houston game, Kellogg's team went to halftime knowing they had held a major conference team averaging 74.9 points a game to just 8 points.
The dominance even amazed Kellogg, admitting it was unexpected.
"That first quarter set the tone for the entire game," Kellogg said. "We wanted to get off to a quick start and knew if we could prevent them from scoring they couldn't pressure us as much as they wanted to."
But ZERO points.
"Obviously, you don't set out to hold them not a point in the quarter, but we wanted to punch first and see if we could get some offensive flow."
It became a tidal wave rather than a flow.
"I didn't like our offensive flow early, but we did enough and kind of settled in. We knew they would come at us in the second half with one little run at us, if they could, but we kind of squashed that and kind of coasted from there."
You do not often hear a coach using the verb "squashed" for what he did at any time to the other team.
But this was not a braggadocious "squash; simply an honest description of what had transpired before a crowd of 2,251 while against a men's game between WVU and Oklahoma on ESPN+ at the same time.
"Protect your own court, then steal those wins on the road to do something special," Kellogg said.
The Mountaineers have protected their court to the tune of nine victories in 10 games, the only loss being to No. 10 Texas, the first of two losses in a row they carried into the Houston game after they followed the Texas defeat by losing at Iowa State, blowing a 19-point lead.
How did that first-quarter shutout come about, though?
"Because they missed some shots and we played hard and turned them over a little bit. And we rebounded pretty well tonight, something we hadn't been doing, so when they missed we limited them to one shot and out. We wanted them to be one and done," Kellogg said.
It helped that Houston's best player, Laila Blair, got into early foul trouble.
"That probably impacted what happened quite a bit," Kellogg admitted. "You know, she's the go-to scorer and she's a super, super talented offensive player. You look at a box score and she's the first name on the list, averaging 15 of 16 a game. We put some attention on her for sure.
"We wanted to go at her a little bit on the offensive end, too, try to see if we could tire her out, make her have to defend a little bit."
They couldn't tire her out. She wound up sitting by fouling out with 3 points and having only 15 minutes on the floor.
"She had what, 30 or 33 the night before, so she had our attention," Kellogg said.
Once the momentum got rolling, there was no stopping it for Houston.
"Once we get going, we're not really worried about the score," WVU's Jayla Hemingway said. "We just know that once we go out there, if we play to our standard, the scoreboard won't matter in the end."