It wasn't as bad as you would have thought ... Sometimes things went on that wouldn't happen in other games. (But) for the most part we kept it clean on both sides, until the end there.

Our guys are tough. We've been battle-tested. We've had overtime games in the season, double-overtime games, so the close games really don't rattle us at this point.

I have been coming to these games for 20 years.

[Fortunately for Minnesota, it has the league's easiest remaining schedule, with 25 of its final 31 games against teams with losing records. However, a favorable schedule means nothing if the rotation doesn't do its part.] We feel like we're beginning to click, ... but we need to really pick it up. Then maybe everyone will forget about how bad we were in the first half.

Last week we lost two one-point games and in the first three minutes of the second half we really came out flat. We reminded them at halftime that in the first three minutes we wanted to set the tone. Well, we didn't set the tone. Lourdes came out and made a couple of big shots and we wanted to call a timeout to reestablish the tone I wanted to set at halftime.

They're very important games. We need to win all four of them so that we can keep ourselves in the Mountain West Conference race.