In the quiet hours before Dahlberg Arena became a madhouse, Sophia Stiles imagined the moment one more time.
It wasn’t the first time, given how heavily it weighed on her mind.
In five years as a Lady Griz, Stiles had never accomplished what some people would say is the fundamental goal of any Montana athlete – beating Montana State.
In fact, in five years since Robin Selvig left the head coaching job, the Lady Griz, once unstoppable queens of the Big Sky Conference, had beaten Montana State once, in February 2018.
Stiles, then a freshman, missed that game with a knee injury that also kept her out for her entire sophomore season.
After that? Back-to-back losses to Montana State in 2019-20, Shannon Schweyen’s fourth year as head coach. Back-to-back losses in 2020-21, Mike Petrino’s first year. And a 73-59 loss in Bozeman on January 24, 2022, in Brian Holsinger’s first year.
If you’re keeping track, that’s three head coaches and five straight losses to Montana State for Stiles, seven overall for the Lady Griz.
In the interim, Stiles, a former two-time Montana Gatorade Player of the Year at Malta, overcame the injury to become a focal point for the Lady Griz, a disruptive perimeter defender who grew into the lead ballhandler role after McKenzie Johnston graduated and became one of the steadiest point guards in the Big Sky.
Her classmate Abby Anderson, who came in with Stiles in 2017-18, turned from a skinny project from Hillsboro, Oregon, into an all-conference-caliber post player.
But like Stiles, Anderson, who redshirted in 2017-18, had never played in a win over Montana State. What was once a forgone conclusion — Montana led the series 79-26 before this recent losing streak — turned into one of the most visible signs of the decline of the Lady Griz program.
So, before tip-off on Saturday, Stiles thought about it again, the moment when her team would finally take down the ‘Cats. She pictured herself running out the clock, hugging her teammates, celebrating with her family, dousing Holsinger with water in the locker room.
Hours later, she was living it on her senior night after the Lady Griz ran away with a 71-57 rivalry win.
“I actually really thought about it tonight, about how cool it would be to be doing this with my teammates,” Stiles said. “I mean, it’s a moment that I won’t ever forget.”
There were plenty of those moments for Stiles and Anderson on Saturday. Like when redshirt junior Carmen Gfeller caught a skip pass from Nyah Morris-Nelson in the corner, hit a stepback 3 and held her follow-through all the way back up the court in the second quarter.
Or in the third quarter, when Anderson, who had to leave the game with a bloody nose in the first half after taking an elbow from Montana State’s Kola Bad Bear, blocked Bad Bear’s 3-pointer and kept running up the court, gathering an outlet pass from Gfeller and laying it in.
“That was maybe my favorite play, maybe next to Carmen’s step-back 3,” Stiles said. “But that was definitely a momentum shift and Dahlberg exploded.”
That pushed Montana’s lead to 10 points for the first time. Montana State cut the deficit back to single digits just once the rest of the way, on a Leia Beattie layup to start the fourth quarter before Anderson responded with another bucket.
Gfeller certainly carried the Lady Griz in their shocking 71-57 win against the second-place Bobcats, finishing with 34 points and eight rebounds in one of the best individual performances in the conference so far this season.
It also wouldn’t have happened without the steady contributions of Stiles and Anderson in potentially their last chance to avoid a winless career against the Bobcats.
The Lady Griz honored five seniors before the game, but Sammy Fatkin missed her eighth straight game with an ankle injury. Morris-Nelson, who transferred to Montana before the 2020-21 season, played 30 minutes but scored just two points. Kylie Frohlich played 10 minutes and didn’t score. Of that group, Stiles and Anderson were the only ones on the roster in 2017-18, and they were the ones who came up big.
Stiles, who can be up and down, channeled her emotions and comprehensively won her matchup with Big Sky MVP front-runner Darian White, who shot 3 of 12 for nine points. Stiles finished with 13 points, eight rebounds and five assists.
Anderson, who was bleeding all over the floor after the hit from Bad Bear, came back in and finished with 12 points (6-7 shooting), five rebounds and five assists.
Along with Gfeller’s hot shooting, they were the biggest reason the Lady Griz tore up Montana State’s sagging defense. After a slow start to the game for Montana’s offense, Stiles ran White through a gauntlet of picks, staying patient, forcing switches and cracking open the Bobcats time after time. Both Stiles and Anderson showed off their passing skills with laser-accurate deliveries to shooters in the corners, punishing Montana State for helping too much on Montana’s posts.
One win doesn’t make up for seven straight rivalry losses, or change the fact that the balance of power in the rivalry is still shifted firmly towards Bozeman, where the ‘Cats are all but guaranteed to be a top-three seed in the conference tournament yet again under 17th-year head coach Tricia Binford, the longest tenured coach in the league.
Saturday, though, came about as close as it gets. It wasn’t just a streak-snapping win, it was a whipping, making Montana State look lost in front of a raucous home crowd.
Which explains why Stiles was so jubilant in the postgame press conference – surely not a moment she pictured before the game, but one she enjoyed just as much as the rest of them as she teased Gfeller about taking some credit for her big night and rolled out a steady string of adjectives to try to describe the way she was feeling.
It was “amazing,” she said. Special. Awesome. Incredible. Everything, in the end, that she had imagined.
“I’m just really, really proud of the upperclassmen,” Lady Griz coach Brian Holsinger said. “These guys have been through so much. They’ve been through a lot of hard things, different coaches. … For the seniors to flip the script a little bit and get a win against that team is a big-time deal.”
