Hansen: Arizona women answered when opportunity knocked

Is that possible: 105-3?

If you think Lute Olson and John Wooden dominated West Coast basketball, Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer arrived at McKale Center on Sunday afternoon having won 14 consecutive Pac-12 championships.

Arizona and Stanford are in the same league, but not really.

The Wildcats opened the season losing to Cal State-Bakersfield. And then Toledo. And then Stephen F. Austin.

So when Stanford took a 30-18 halftime lead Saturday afternoon, Pac-12 Networks broadcasters Anne Marie Anderson and Ros Gold-Onwude started killing time in what seemed sure to be another basketball shellacking.

And why not? Stanford had not lost to a conference team with a losing record since 2004, a streak of 207 games.

Rather than follow the play-by-play, Anderson and Gold-Onwude began chatting about Stanford’s Lili Thompson, who told them she wanted to be president of the United States someday and that she was hoping to persuade President Obama to attend Stanford’s Friday game against USC.

“Lili does not see limits,” said Gold-Onwude.

That’s a good way to describe the Stanford-Arizona basketball rivalry: unlimited mortification. Stanford’s last three visits to McKale resulted in 96-52, 91-51 and 91-61 victories.

But with 17 minutes remaining Sunday, the dialogue changed.

Stanford’s Amber Orrange, a McDonald’s All-American, missed a jump shot that teasingly rested on the flat of iron and fell away. Anderson told viewers: “It’s not happening.”

Game on.

After extending its lead to 32-18, Stanford missed 12 consecutive shots. In one particularly dizzying sequence, the Cardinal missed four shots on a single possession. By then it was a one-point game.

Reacting to the game’s sudden change, the graphics people in the TV truck flashed a message on the screen: ARIZONA HAS NOT BEATEN STANFORD SINCE 2004.

It’s no mystery why Arizona rarely beats Stanford (it was 6-55 in history entering Sunday’s game). The Cardinal roster includes two McDonald’s All-Americans; two more players who have been part of the USA Basketball invitation-only camps; a center who was on England’s 2012 Olympics roster; a five-star recruit from Wyoming; and the aforementioned Thompson, who has already been the national Player of the Week this season.

Those six players were more coveted recruits than anyone in the history of UA women’s basketball, including Adia Barnes and Shawntinice Polk.

Yet the best player on the court Sunday was 5-foot-5-inch Arizona guard Candice Warthen of Warrenton, Georgia, who was part Steph Curry, part Chris Paul in the second half.

Even though she was the smallest player on the court at all times, Warthen had nine rebounds.

Arizona took its first lead at 44-43 with a bit more than five minutes remaining, and stretched it to 46-43, but the Wildcats seemed gassed after a 15-minute uphill climb.

Stanford went on an 11-0 run. Game over, right? Arizona would fall to 1-11 in the conference. Butts’ job security (she is 88-122 overall) would resume as Topic 1.

As Stanford’s Bonnie Samuelson went to the foul line, shooting one-and-one, with a minute to play, it was 57-53.

“She’s an epic free-throw shooter,” said Anderson. Indeed, Samuelsen was 49 for 54 over the season (90.7 percent). She could ice the game.

Instead, she bricked the first shot in what became — although no one on TV called it such — an epic final 60 seconds.

In the last minute, Warthen scored seven points, four of them driving through a forest of much taller players. Stanford did not score. It was tied at 57 when Butts called a timeout with 6.9 seconds remaining.

The so-called “crowd” at McKale, listed at 1,359 but looking more like 700, was on its feet. They made as much noise as a crowd of 7,000.

The play that Butts called wasn’t unlike the play that Arizona needed in the final ticks of last year’s painful Elite Eight loss to Wisconsin. Nick Johnson was unable to score that night, but on Sunday afternoon, it didn’t seem possible that Warthen would miss.

Butts’ play was a thing of beauty. Catching the in-bounds pass and getting a technically perfect screen from LaBrittney Jones in front of the Arizona bench, Warthen was too quick for two scrambling Cardinal defenders, Orrange and Erica Payne.

Once she found space, Warthen swished a textbook jumper — wrist follow-through in the style of a Jerry West video — with 1.9 seconds remaining.

Improbable?

Arizona hadn’t shot 50 percent in a game this season; it shot 57 percent in the second half. It limited Stanford to 34 percent shooting; two days earlier, Cal shot 61 percent in a second-half rout at McKale.

The Pac-12 broadcasters referred to it as a “momentous” victory. But Butts took it a step further. On her Twitter account, she twice used a hashtag reference of “breakthrough.”

Was it a job-saving, season-changing breakthrough, or just an isolated 60-57 upset? Of Arizona’s six remaining conference games, five are against teams that don’t have a winning record in the Pac-12.

Arizona didn’t just knock off Stanford; it answered the door when opportunity knocked.