WVU guard Sydney Shaw, pictured, had 11 points against Colorado on Wednesday.

MORGANTOWN — If this does indeed wind up being a special enough type of season in which the WVU women’s basketball team contends for a Big 12 title, the 20th-ranked Mountaineers can look at what it accomplished Wednesday night as a positive sign.

Jordan Harrison scored 18 points and added six steals to lead the Mountaineers to a 61-55 victory against Colorado, handing the Buffaloes their first home loss in Big 12 play this season.

The six steals gave Harrison 305 for her career.

“Colorado is a tough team and a very good defensive team,” Harrison told ESPN following the game. “We just had to keep finding ways to score, whether that was threes or in the paint. I feel like we never really got settled in.”

The game, itself, was a 40-minute grind, one the Mountaineers (19-5, 9-3 Big 12) led for 35 minutes, but never secured a double-digit lead.

Neither team shot well. WVU forced Colorado (15-8, 6-5) into 17 turnovers, a total far away from the 30 the Mountaineers’ defense forced against nationally-ranked Baylor in their last game. The Mountaineers also turned it over 15 times themselves.

It had the feel of a ho-hum mid-week game in the dead cold of February, in which not much energy was being created.

It’s exactly those types of games that can kill you if you’re a team in the championship hunt that comes up on the short end of the scoreboard.

Once March rolls around – and WVU head coach Mark Kellogg and the Mountaineers know this from their previous two seasons – if your team finishes one or two games back in the league standings, there is generally that one night when the team just didn’t have it in a game that didn’t seem to matter at the time against an opponent that wasn’t favored to win.

That’s how Wednesday night felt inside the CU Events Center. There wasn’t much of a crowd in a large arena. It’s still early February. Snow is piled up everywhere.

WVU could have very easily dropped this game and very few outside the state of West Virginia would have probably noticed.

Instead, the Mountaineers prevailed. Harrison almost willed WVU to a victory, scoring 11 points right off the bat and then let her defense do most of the talking the rest of the way.

“I think every Big 12 game we’ve played in has been 10 points or less,” Harrison said. “We’ve been in this situation a lot, and that’s helped us. Once you have experience doing it, you’re a little bit more calm and we can pull these games out.”

In the final moments, Harrison sealed the outcome with a pass. She drove through the lane, only to stop and spin back into the middle of the paint. She found teammate Carter McCray for a lay-up that gave WVU a 60-55 lead with just 25 seconds remaining.

Colorado’s Desiree Wooten had an opportunity to cut into WVU’s lead 10 seconds later, but went 0 for 2 from the foul line. Harrison was then fouled and made 1 of 2 from the foul line for the final score.

And with the victory, WVU continues to keep pace with both Baylor and TCU for the Big 12 regular-season championship, something the Mountaineers haven’t experienced since 2014.

Both the Bears and Horned Frogs won on Wednesday, so they keep that half-game advantage in the standings at 9-2 in Big 12 play.

WVU has six games remaining, including a road game against TCU on Feb. 15, which could very much determine who sits on the league’s throne this season.

That matchup would have likely meant very little, though, if WVU didn’t find a way in this one.

“We just made a few more plays,” was the way Kellogg put it on his postgame radio show. “We’ve been getting better every fourth quarter, so I was encouraged to see that. I think we’re getting a little bit better. This was a big road win.”

Gia Cooke added 12 points for WVU, which returns home to face Arizona on Saturday, and teammate Sydney Shaw added 11 points.