The only thing anti-climactic about this weekend’s 6th Annual Fastbreak Fest was the post-tournament awards ceremony.

While the NIU women’s basketball team didn’t clinch the tournament title until the final six seconds of Sunday’s championship game, Huskie center Carol Owens left little doubt about who the tourney’s most dominant player was.

After scoring a career-high 33 points to lead the Huskies past 16th-ranked North Carolina State, Owens was named as the tournament’s Most Valuable Player.

And judging by the standing ovation Owens received from the small but boisterous crowd on hand, no one was surprised.

No, not even the soft-spoken Owens, who admitted after the game that she had played through the tournament with her confidence level at an all-time high.

“I’ve found that the more confident I am during a game, the better I play,” the 6-foot-3 junior said of her championship game showing, which included a 13-rebound effort in addition to her red-hot 14-for-20 shooting performance from the field. “And I think I was as confident as I’ve ever been today. I can honestly say that I went through a championship game, pressure situation without ever really getting nervous.”

NIU coach Jane Albright and Owens’ teammates would be able to verify that.

Whenever N.C. State made a run at the Huskies, Owens was there to help NIU regain momentum. After N.C. State took its biggest lead of the game at 52-47, Owens grabbed three straight defensive rebounds on the Wolfpack’s next three trips down the floor and scored successive baskets on offensive rebounds (after a pair of layups by Gena Stubbs) to put NIU back on top, 55-52 with 9:11 left in the game. Then, twice after N.C. State put together a pair of unanswered baskets in the final four minutes, Owens answered for NIU—once with a pair of free throws (with 3:24 left) and a second time with an eight-foot turn-around jumper on the baseline (with 2:54 left).

“Down the stretch, Carol found a way to win the game for us,” Albright said. “Mentally and physically she was on top of every play. Even when she knew she had already played the game of her life, she dug down a little deeper at the end of the game.”

And it wasn’t just Sunday’s performance that put Owens into the MVP limelight. In the Huskies’ 91-77 opening-round win over Butler, Owens came close to notching a second-straight triple-double performance—a feat unheard of at any level of basketball. After a 23-point, 10-rebound, 11-steal outing against Western Illinois on Thursday, Owens came back Saturday and hit unsuspecting Butler with a 21-point, 10-rebound, 8-steal effort. In the tournament, Owens scored 54 points and grabbed 23 rebounds.

“Being MVP is great and a real accomplishment, but I could have just as easily been MVP and we could have lost,” Owens said. “I couldn’t have done anything without the team, and that’s (the team) really the only thing that matters. I’m just hoping we can use this (the tourney championship) and build on it. We just beat a team in the Top 20, and now we might get some recognition. That’s what really feels great.”