How a road rally in mid-August catapulted the Fever to the WNBA semifinals

INDIANAPOLIS -- The Indiana Fever sat in the locker room at Mohegan Sun Arena facing a big problem. It was Aug. 17, and they trailed the last-place Connecticut Sun by 19 points. Two games above .500 with three weeks remaining in the regular season, every game mattered in Indiana's quest to clinch a playoff spot.

But the hits kept coming. Ten days earlier, the Fever lost point guards Sydney Colson and Aari McDonald to season-ending injuries in the same game. Caitlin Clark had been out for a month and still had no timetable to return. And that very afternoon, in the second quarter, guard Sophie Cunningham suffered what looked to be a serious knee injury.

Fever coach Stephanie White presented a simple challenge to her players in the locker room. When things get tough, she said, people usually respond one of two ways: fight or flight. The Fever? They're fighters, she told them. They fight for one another every play, every day.

That's exactly what Indiana did in the second half, erasing a 21-point deficit to prevail 99-93 in overtime, the largest comeback in franchise history.

The game would prove to be a turning point for Indiana's season.

"No matter the circumstance, we showed up and we found it," White said this week about the Connecticut game. "And I think at that moment, you could really understand how special this group was."

The resilience and belief the Fever tapped into that afternoon helped them reach the franchise's first WNBA semifinal appearance since 2015 and remain steadfast as their series (1-1) shifts to Indianapolis for Game 3 on Friday (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN2).

Never mind that the Fever are the No. 6 seed. That they are without Clark and five other injured players. That they had to survive two elimination games versus the No. 3 seed in the first round. Or that they are now facing the Las Vegas Aces, winners of two of the past three WNBA titles.

"They've got something inside them you just can't teach," White said after the Sun game, holding back tears in her postgame news conference. "It allows us to go through these incredibly tough times that we're going through and always gives us a chance."

The Fever entered that August afternoon at Connecticut on a two-game skid after dropping back-to-back home games to what ended up being lottery teams. The Sun had only six wins at that point but had started to turn a corner in the second half of the season. Connecticut jumped ahead 24-11 at the end of the first quarter.

"They punched us in the face," Fever leading scorer Kelsey Mitchell, who scored four points in that first half, said this week. "You take the game for granted, and a good team in Connecticut -- who was on paper not really good -- they challenge you."

Then disaster struck early in the second quarter when a Connecticut player fell into Cunningham's right knee while driving to the basket. Cunningham hobbled on one leg and clutched her knee before sinking to the floor in pain.

It was, to White, a "holy s---" moment, she said at the time. "It was just like, 'What else can we handle?'" White said. "'What else can we take?'"

As the team collected itself at the half, it was a gut-check moment, Mitchell said. The Fever focused on chipping away at the deficit, aiming to get it to single digits by the start of the fourth quarter, forward Aliyah Boston recalled. And they would have to do it without Cunningham's toughness and 3-point shooting, but that only fueled them.

"Because we believe in each other so much, it doesn't matter what happens, what hand we're dealt," Indiana guard Lexie Hull said this week. "We believe that we can get the job done."

Entering the game, WNBA teams were 29-1,722 all-time when trailing by 20-plus points, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. That record changed that day.

The Fever pulled within eight late in the third and outscored the Sun 32-21 in the fourth, with Boston delivering the overtime-forcing shot with 21.8 seconds remaining in regulation.

"Our team emptying out for each other," assistant coach Briann January said this week, "there is no greater display of what that looks like than that game."

Mitchell put her first-half struggles behind her, exploding for 34 points after the break and singlehandedly outscoring the Sun in overtime (10-9). Guard Odyssey Sims, who had signed a hardship contract with Indiana a week earlier, found her footing as the game progressed, compiling 13 points and five assists after halftime.

After sitting on the bench for the first half -- and getting minimal playing time up to that point of the season -- forward Brianna Turner recorded a plus-10 plus/minus in 14 minutes. Her defense changed the momentum of the game -- and that, White said, "changed the course of the last however many weeks of the season for us."

The Fever's fortitude reminds January of Indiana's 2012 team, which she played on, that overcame injuries to Katie Douglas and Jeanette Pohlen to win the WNBA title.

"I think that moment really proved to our team the power that we have in numbers, what we have collectively, and what we're able to accomplish if we work together," January said. "It was like, 'Whoa, OK, all right, when we get down, if we stick together, we can accomplish some amazing things.'"

After the game, even though nothing had yet been clinched or decided, White was in tears when addressing the team in the locker room.

"I'm so f---ing proud of you," White said. "If we fight, live that resilience every f---ing day, we will accomplish what we want to accomplish."

The Fever have consistently attributed to their tight-knit locker room their ability to keep afloat amid so much adversity. It's a credit, too, White and her players have said, to the front office for bringing in selfless teammates.

"The way that we love each other and the way that we want to compete for each other, we've been able to build such great relationships," Boston said this week. "So when things get tough, we don't run. We come together and we talk about it and we have discussions, and I feel like that's just helped us so much throughout this entire season."

Not that there weren't struggles after that 21-point comeback. Cunningham's injury was revealed to be a season-ending MCL tear. The team ruled Clark out for the rest of the season in early September. The Fever's playoff spot wasn't guaranteed until their second-to-last game of the regular season.

In the playoffs, Indiana dropped Game 1 in the first round against Atlanta. Later, in a winner-take-all Game 3, the Fever trailed for 29 minutes before another late Boston basket with seven seconds left gave them the lead.

In the locker room afterward, Turner said the team thought back to the Connecticut comeback. It helped prepare the Fever for this moment.

Indiana now must confront an Aces team that snagged the series' momentum back with a 22-point Game 2 victory. The Fever are still considered underdogs: According to ESPN BET, Las Vegas is favored to win Game 3 by 4.5 points, and Indiana has the worst odds (+3000) to win the Finals.

But the Fever don't seem to mind.

"Regardless of whether people think we aren't going to win, people think we're not going to come back," Hull said, "the game's never over until that final buzzer."