LAS VEGAS — Just five more minutes.
 
A season full of setbacks and six players carrying a bulk of the load for much of the year wasn't quite ready to be over yet on Thursday when the buzzer sounded for the end of the fourth quarter.
 
The University of San Francisco women's basketball team and Santa Clara were tied 58-58 after four periods, with the buzzer signaling five more minutes of basketball, instead of the end of it all.
 
And it was there that the Dons gave their last exasperated sigh of the 2019-20 season. A weary San Francisco team took a four-point lead early, but missed shots and fouls did it in, as the No. 8-seed Broncos outlasted No. 9 USF, 72-65, in overtime to advance in the 2020 West Coast Conference Championship Tournament at Orleans Arena.
 
"It's been a challenging season," said San Francisco head coach Molly Goodenbour. "We just asked them to be very different people and players and teammates than they'd been before, and very much to their credit they stayed engaged through a lot of losses to get to a point where now we feel like we're able to compete with everybody we play against. I just give these guys tremendous credit for taking ownership of their team and of their season and sticking with it when it was hard. It was nice to have them, these last few games of the year, really reap some of the reward of being resilient and being hard-working."
 
It was the second time this season the Dons (12-19, 5-13 WCC) and Broncos (12-18, 5-13 WCC) went to overtime, and it nearly finished with an identical score after USF topped Santa Clara, 72-66 in overtime on Feb. 1 in the South Bay. But history was on the Broncos' side Thursday, entering the first-round matchup with a 7-0 record all-time against the Dons in the WCC Tournament.
 
"I thought we didn't start out the game as aggressively as we maybe had some of the other games," said Goodenbour. "We weren't crashing the boards, let them get some easy shots and shoot a real high field-goal percentage. I thought we were scoring the ball decent ourselves, so there were two evenly matched teams today. I think we ran out of gas a little bit, maybe, made some uncharacteristic turnovers in that overtime game that were not great."
 
San Francisco worked hard to come from behind all afternoon – its biggest push coming in the fourth quarter when it wiped away a nine-point deficit with a 13-3 run that gave it a one-point, 58-57 lead with 3 1/2 minutes to go. The run was bookended by 3-pointers from Mikayla Williams and Leilah Vigil, and a clutch three-point play from Lucie Hoskova, but that was all the energy the run could take, and it stopped there.
 
Thanks to a 1-for-2 showing at the free-throw line by Santa Clara's Jimenez with 93 seconds left, the game stayed tied at 58-58. USF's defense forced Santa Clara to go 2 for 13 (15.4%) from the floor in the fourth, but it couldn't capitalize on the other end. San Francisco missed its final six shots of the fourth quarter, including four 3-point attempts and a layup from the right side that bounced off the side rim with four seconds remaining.
 
"These guys all year have just given everything they've had every second, and I thought we did that again tonight," said Goodenbour.
 
Williams concluded her college career as the Dons' leading scorer with 21 points, her fifth 20-point game of the season. She tied her career high with three 3-pointers and also had eight rebounds, two assists and a steal. The all-WCC Second Team honoree was an All-American and all-everything else during her three years at UC San Diego before coming to The Hilltop this season.
 
"It's been a great experience for me," said Williams. "I really wanted to come to a place where I could make a difference and I could grow both as a person and also athletically, and I think USF has really allowed me to do that. I came from where I would drive a couple from the elbow and I would post up, and then out here, shooting 3s and trying to be a little bit more of a behind-the-scenes point guard for our team, helping them call plays and everything."
 
San Francisco still put what little pedal it had left to the floor in the overtime period, jumping out to a four-point, 62-58 lead 90 seconds in. It would go just 1 for 7 after that, while five called fouls gave Santa Clara 10 free-throw attempts, all of which it made.
 
"We've had four different seasons and three different teams to coach," said Goodenbour. "We started out with a lot of healthy bodies and a really bright start with some good freshmen and I think we had some kids returning that were gonna help us, had a lot of injuries so we went into the first half of conference play really with a completely different team than we had played all of non-conference with and it really took us that first month and a half to figure out how we were gonna coach these guys and how were we gonna play and be able to put ourselves in a position to be successful with the players that we had.
 
"Once we sort of got a handle on that, the kids really bought into having to do some things they've never done before. We got forwards playing point guard, Mikayla, (Dolapo Balogun) and Leilah had never shot a 3-pointer in their careers and now they're probably our best 3-point shooters, and it's something that they take regularly."
 
Vigil notched her 15th double-double in her first season with the Dons on 17 points and 16 rebounds. She finished the season averaging a double-double for the second time in her collegiate career (12.5 points, 10.4 rebounds per game). In one season, she scored a career-high 386 points and pulled down a career-best 321 rebounds.
 
"I think Leilah is a tremendous competitor," said Goodenbour. "She's little. She's always been an undersized post. She plays with a chip on her shoulder and she plays like an underdog every game and I think she's used to being underestimated, but one of her greatest strengths is her confidence. She has great confidence in herself and because she is so highly competitive, she knows that she wants to be in a position to take clutch shots and then she wants to make those shots and she usually does."