SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Although the Wisconsin women’s basketball team may not be able to pronounce the name of the Vermont Catamount player who did more than anyone to send the Badgers home on Sunday, they will be hard-pressed to forget her face.

Courtnay Pilypaitis, a 6-foot-1 senior guard from Ottawa, Ontario, guided the Catamounts past the 7-seeded Badgers with game-highs in points (25), rebounds (8) and assists (4). Pilypaitis’ line, though, is more than just impressive for the versatility it demonstrates — it was clutch.

Included in her 25 was a stretch in which she scored nine of Vermont’s 11 points after a 39-39 tie and five of her team’s seven free throws in the last minute, which allowed the Catamounts to maintain their lead despite frantic last-gasp efforts from UW.

“Every time we were able to get a little bit of momentum, she did a great job of capitalizing on our mistakes,” junior guard Alyssa Karel, who led Wisconsin with 13 points said. “I think on defense we’d make little mistakes — not defending the screen right, going under instead of over a pick — and she capitalized on it and made us pay.”

But Pilypaitis is hardly a stranger to stuffing stat sheets. She is the only active player in Division I to have compiled career totals of over 1,900 points, 900 rebounds and 600 assists, and she is one of just two players in the country to be ranked in her league’s top five in scoring, rebounding and assists.

Additionally, Pilypaitis has a tradition of stepping her play up when the games really start counting. In three career tournament appearances (one WNIT and two NCAAs), she has averaged over 23 points a game.

Exacerbating matters for the Badgers, Pilypaitis wasn’t the only Catamount guard causing verbal, as well as on-court, trouble. Her backcourt mate and fellow Canadian, May Kotsopoulous, the America East Fans’ Choice Player of the Year, added 14 points on 5-of-10 shooting, meaning the dynamic backcourt duo accounted for 61 percent of the team’s scoring.

“They are very good,” UW head coach Lisa Stone said of the two. “Numbers 3 and 4 are what they are made up to be.”

Turnovers, free throw shortage led to Badgers’ loss

During the regular season, this year’s Badger squad tied a school-record for fewest turnovers in a season, averaging just 15.5 a game.

Then, in the first half of its first tournament game Wisconsin reverted to old tendencies, turning the ball over nine times, leading to 12 Vermont points. For the game, the Badgers, stressed at times by a 1-2-2 halfcourt trap, were outscored off turnovers 21-11.

“Their defense, first of all, gave their offense a spark,” Stone said of the Catamounts’ defensive pressure. “Our impatience offensively against their trapping defense and zone gave them opportunities. Look, they scored 21 points off turnovers. … Their size and length disturbed us a bit.”

And impatience also contributed to the Badgers difficulty in getting to the free-throw line, where they were outshot by 18. Even with inflated free-throw numbers due to late game fouling, the Catamounts already held a seven-point advantage at the half, outshooting the Badgers 8-of-13 to 1-of-3.

Karel, who reached double-digits for the 26th time in 32 games, said the team may not have attacked aggressively enough, but couldn’t definitively pinpoint an explanation.

“I think we settled for outside shots a lot,” she said. “We came out right away with our inside play, and then we kind of shied away from that, I’m not really sure why. We had a tough time getting in the lane, I think it was maybe the zone they put on us in the second half and their length outside.”

Yet whether the blame is put on Vermont’s talented backcourt, early turnovers or free-throw inequities, the incontrovertible takeaway point from Wisconsin’s first tournament game in eight years was that it was chalked up in the right-hand column.

Which is why, in a teary, emotional postgame scene, Karel looked to the next year and how this experience was not for naught.

“Things could’ve been different — it was in our hands — but this is a motivator for us,” she said. “Now we have the expectation of getting here. We know what it takes to do it, so we’re just going to get in the gym in the offseason and keep getting better.”