Only one team showed up to play at Wednesday night’s game. And the NIU women’s basketball team wasn’t it.

With 12:23 minutes left in the first half, NIU forward Mary Basic drove right from the top of the key. The junior beat her defender, got fouled and made a layup. A classic three-point play. Only problem: those were the first points NIU scored in the game.

By the time Basic scored those first points, the Huskies had already dug themselves into a hole. A 20-0 hole to be exact. And NIU wasn’t able to dig itself out.

“EMU attacked us early,” NIU coach Carol Owens said. “We just couldn’t bounce back quick enough until we were down 20-0.”

The 20-0 run started innocently enough with a short jumper by EMU’s Patrice McKinney 27-seconds into the game.

But what started so innocently quickly got out of hand.

After 2:34 the Huskies were down by nine. A minute later it was 13. Soon after the scoreboard showed the brutal truth of how far behind NIU was.

It wasn’t like NIU didn’t have its chances to score.

The Huskies missed six shots during that time period. Four of them coming from behind the three-point arc.

But any chance the Huskies had at getting on the board was quickly killed by turnovers.

After the game Owens said she didn’t know what she would have to do to get her team ready after the way they played.

“Maybe I’ll have to get my shorts on to get them ready,” said the second leading scorer in NIU history.