So much for all the hype.
Behind its best offensive performance of the season, the women's basketball team turned its highly-anticipated clash against seven-time defending NESCAC champion Bowdoin into a laugher, blowing past the powerhouse Polar Bears 83-56 Friday night at Cousens Gym.
The victory was the 20th of the year for the nationally ranked No. 21 Jumbos, setting a new single-season program wins record.
Tufts followed the monumental effort with a 24-point victory over Colby on Saturday afternoon, closing the regular season at 7-2 in conference play and clinching the second seed in the NESCAC Tournament.
"It was the inspired basketball that we've been waiting to play and that I've been waiting to see," coach Carla Berube said. "In both games, we came out with great energy and an intensity defensively that I think had been lacking for a little while. This was the Jumbo basketball that we know we can play."
The Jumbos shot a blistering 57.8 percent from the field against Bowdoin - a team that came into Friday's game atop the NESCAC standings - for Tufts' best single-game shooting performance of the Berube era.
Tufts' offensive efficiency helped build a 35-point second-half lead - the Jumbos, a squad that hadn't beaten the Polar Bears since December 1994, had surprised even themselves.
"You go into a game thinking that you can win and that you can beat whoever you're playing," said senior co-captain Khalilah Ummah, who earned her fourth career NESCAC Player of the Week honor over the weekend. "But to actually be up the way we were was amazing. I looked up at the scoreboard, and I was like, 'Wow, we're up by 20.' The next thing we knew, I looked up again, and I said, 'Wow, we're up by 30.' I couldn't believe it."
Ummah and junior forward Katie Tausanovitch helped the Jumbos dominate in the paint, where Tufts outscored the Polar Bears 48-16 and out-rebounded them 43-19. The duo combined for 36 points on 17-of-24 shooting and 19 rebounds and neutralized a Bowdoin frontcourt that was without injured First Team All-NESCAC forward Jill Anelauskas for much of the game.
"When Tausi's playing well, and K the same thing, they just control the boards," Berube said. "They do a fantastic job of boxing out and going after the rebound. I think definitely a big key to our success was our ability to control the boards."
Senior co-captain Jenna Gomez also had a major hand in the victory, pouring in a career-high 19 points and joining Ummah and Tausanovitch as the Jumbos' double-digit scorers.
The next afternoon, the Jumbos celebrated Senior Day with an 84-60 thrashing of 8-14 Colby, emptying their entire bench along the way. The team honored Gomez and Ummah, its lone seniors, with a pregame ceremony before wrapping up its best-ever regular season with its eighth 20-point victory.
The Mules got more production from the free-throw line than they did from the field, where they were held to just 14-of-42 shooting. But Tufts was whistled for 25 of the 48 fouls called in the game, leading to 31 Colby points from the charity stripe.
"We didn't play smart basketball defensively," Berube said. "We tried to go for some dumb steals, we didn't play with our feet and we didn't rely on our help defense if we were getting beat. It took us out of our flow and gave them easy points. That's not the way we want to play at all. That's messy, ugly basketball."
Despite their sloppy play, the Jumbos were never threatened, leading from the opening bucket and building as much as a 30-point second-half cushion before cruising to their 21st win of the season.
Ummah led five Jumbos in double figures, racking up 17 points and 19 rebounds - 10 of which came on the offensive glass - to go along with five blocked shots.
Tausanovitch added a double-double, while sophomore forward Julia Baily contributed 10 points off the bench. Gomez and freshman point guard Colleen Hart also reached double figures for Tufts.
With the victory, the Jumbos locked up the second seed and home-court advantage for the first round of the NESCAC Tournament, which gets underway next Saturday afternoon.
Tufts' 7-2 conference record is tied with Amherst for the best in the NESCAC, but because the Jeffs won the head-to-head matchup against the Jumbos - a last-second 64-62 victory on Jan. 18 - Amherst beat out Tufts for the top seed.
The Jumbos found themselves in a position to claim the second seed after Williams dropped a pair of conference games over the weekend, including a stunner Friday night against previously winless Conn. College. The losses dropped the Ephs, who entered the weekend in a tie for first place, all the way to sixth.
For the second consecutive season, Tufts' first-round opponent will be the Middlebury Panthers, now a No. 7 seed, a team the Jumbos defeated 61-46 on Feb. 8.
"We have the whole week to prepare," Berube said. "Normally, it's a two-game weekend, but this week there's just one game to focus on. We're excited that it's a home game and that it's in our house, especially because we've been having such great crowds these past two games. We'll be pumped up for sure."
"For Middlebury, we need to just do what we did this past week," Ummah added. "We realized that we hadn't played that well the weekend before and so we went into practice really focused. I think that was a big reason why this weekend was probably one of our best weekends of the season."
