Maya Moore didn't wait for the UConn coaches to come into the locker room at halftime to challenge both herself and her teammates.

Moore can still vividly remember the game at the Louis Brown Athletic Center during her freshman year when the Huskies squandered a first-half lead and suffered its only Big East loss during Moore's wondrous four seasons at Connecticut.

She was determined that history would not repeat. With Moore calmly drilling a 3-pointer 12 seconds into the second half to spearhead a 13-0 run, the Huskies ended any chance the Scarlet Knights had of pulling off the upset.

"Even before the coaches came in at halftime, we just looked at the each other and saying the shots are going to fall," Moore said. "Because we came out of the locker room with confidence in each other, it showed. Sometimes the shots don't fall and you have to keep playing through it. I thought we crashed the boards really well in the first half. The second half we didn't have to depend on offensive rebounding because the shots were falling.

"That is the way we need to start the game. Every time when you are on the road, it is so important to get the crowd out of it and that is the best way to do it, come out of the gates the first five minutes before that first media timeout and make sure you dominated."

To call the first half a struggle for UConn would not be doing justice to the events that transpired.

It didn't help that the Huskies' second-leading scorer Tiffany Hayes was poked in the eye by Rutgers' Erica Wheeler, Hayes' former AAU teammate, 41 seconds into the game and missed the next 7 1/2 minutes or that the Huskies stubbornly attempted to force the ball into the low blocks with usually humbling results.

"Usually offensive continuity comes when you make shots, you run some good stuff, make some shots and everybody goes 'the offense looks great,'" UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. "You come out like we did in the first half, miss a lot of open shots and throw the ball away a lot and the offense looks lousy. Then we come out in the second half, make shots and wow, they'vve got their rhythm back. Mainly it's about if the ball goes in the basket and what kind of shots you are getting. I told them we are getting pretty good looks at the basket, we just need to make a couple of them. Once a couple of them starting going in, they all are going to start going in at some point. That first 10 minutes of the second half was pretty good.

"We spent a lot of time trying to force the ball into the post and Rutgers did a really good job keeping us from doing that. The second half when we came out, we didn't try to force it in to Stefanie and Maya. We said 'look, we are going to get a lot of open shots, take them. Don't spend the whole game trying to force it in the middle."

Auriemma was asked about Hayes' propensity for being knocked to the ground and replied as only he could.

"I think more than anything, the coaching staff Shea (Ralph), Marisa (Moseley), CD (Chris Dailey), (trainer) Rosemary (Ragle) probably they are just annoyed because she falls down and they tell her to get the hell up. She sometimes loses control of her bodily functions."

Hayes' response "he is right." Then she sheepishly admitted she used to fall down even more when she was in high school.