The reaction from Sabrina Ionescu — the two fists clenched as she turned down the court — captured everything. The MVP chants that accompanied her final free throws of the night minutes later did, too.
Leonie Fiebich had just finished an and-one underneath the basket midway through the fourth quarter, an assist from Ionescu, her ninth of the night, serving as the catalyst.
The Liberty, once on upset alert in Game 2 against the Atlanta Dream, went up by eight after the free throw. They extended that to 11 — their largest lead of the game — when Fiebich hit a 3-pointer on the next possession.
But on a night when Atlanta adjusted to most of what went wrong in Game 1, and on a night the Liberty struggled to replicate most of what went right, Ionescu was at the center of everything.
The Liberty needed every one of her playoff career-high 36 points in their 91-82 win at Barclays Center to sweep the Dream and advance to the WNBA semifinals, where a WNBA Finals rematch against the Las Vegas Aces could await.
Ionescu shot 12 of 23 from the field, hit 5 of 11 3-pointers and the player who arrived as the No. 1 pick in 2020 now has a chance to anchor a potential run back to the finals.
Eleven of her 36 points came in the third quarter, when Ionescu abandoned 3-point shots and just kept driving. She hit a layup. Then, a mid-range jumper and another layup.
It helped the Liberty keep pace after entering halftime trailing by five, and eventually, in the fourth quarter, Ionescu helped them pull away.
Before that point, though, the Liberty struggled to replicate their Game 1 blueprint.
The Dream jumped out to an early 11-3 lead, moved the ball in transition and operated on offense with efficiency. Fiebich, the Game 1 hero with her career-high 21 points, didn’t score until the second half and spent most of the game in foul trouble.
Allisha Gray led the Dream with 26 points, while Rhyne Howard and Tina Charles added 19 and 14, respectively, to help generate enough responses when the Liberty crawled back and threatened to pull away.
It took until the fourth quarter, when Ionescu collected her final points, for that to happen.
For a while, though, after the 32 regular-season wins that tied a franchise record from last year and after a convincing Game 1 win and a promising Fiebich breakout, it looked like the Liberty’s season — and the title expectations and aspirations that have accompanied it from the start — would come down to 40 minutes on Thursday, when the superteam and the upset-minded Dream collided one final time in Atlanta.
Head coach Sandy Brondello had warned the Liberty ahead of time.
She reminded them of what happened — or what almost did — last year during the first round of the playoffs, when the No. 7-seed Mystics took Game 2 to overtime before the Liberty escaped with a narrow win.
Brondello even used a Pat Riley quote with her players, emphasizing the point about the pitfalls of not being prepared after a major win.
They were close, too close even, to a win-or-go-home scenario well before they wanted to be.
“And that’s the biggest danger that we have,” Brondello said before the game.
For the first quarter, she was right. For the first half, she was, too. Then, Ionescu took over.