Molly Mogensen found herself in a precarious situation that all playmakers get into at some point throughout a 40-minute game. As the third quarter was winding to a close, she deflected an exchange between Maddie Burke and Lucy Olsen and slid to the other side of mid-court to beat Olsen to the loose ball. There she laid, flat on her back, waiting. Those milliseconds of time slow down for the savviest of decision-makers, and they did once again in that instance as Mogensen found her window to flip a pass over a Villanova defender and into the hands of her teammate of four years, Emma Ronsiek, to initiate a fast break that resulted in an uncontested layup.
“I knew my teammates were going to swarm when I was on the floor,” Mogensen said. “It happened to be Emma, and then Kennedy [Townsend] got the layup.”
That play gave Creighton its largest lead of the game at the time. It was a microcosm of the type of plays Mogensen made all day in crunch time at the end of quarters. She crossed up Olsen in the lane and beat the first quarter buzzer with a layup. Right before halftime, she hit a pull-up jumper in the lane, then stole the ball from Maddie Weber and flipped it to Lauren Jensen for…
