By Dave Johnson
W&M Athletics
 
If Hollywood turns what happened Sunday afternoon at CareFirst Arena into a movie, it would be widely dismissed as too unfathomable.
 
How could a team that metaphorically limped into the CAA tournament as the No. 9 seed win four games in four days? By defeating four opponents that it went 0-6 against during the regular season?
 
But if that film makes the theaters (or a streaming service), it won't be fiction. Behind what will go down as a legendary performance by senior Bella Nascimento, William & Mary made history with a 66-63 win over No. 3 Campbell.
 
The Tribe became the school's first team — women or men — to win the CAA basketball championship and make the NCAA tournament. W&M's next challenge is a Thursday game against Big South champion High Point, a fellow 16 seed, in Austin, Texas.
 
The Tribe won automatic qualifying rights by defeating a Campbell team that had trounced it twice by a combined 39 points in the last six weeks. And the Camels led the Tribe 14-0 less than 4½ minutes into Sunday's championship game.
 
"All we kept saying was believe, believe, believe," Tribe coach Erin Dickerson Davis said. "Nothing matters until the tournament in March."
 
And March is when history is made. The Tribe had already done that by making the championship game as a No. 9 seed. Then came Sunday, which already is drawing national attention.
 
"This is a surreal moment for us," said Nascimento, who was remarkable with career highs of 33 points and 11 rebounds. "Everybody really wanted this win and it started with the belief. Every person had belief that we could do it as a team, and that's what we did."
 
Nascimento, the only choice for tournament MVP, carried her team on her back. OK, so she got a little lucky with an on-the-run, banked 3-pointer at the end of the first half. But for most of the day, she stuck to her strength — the mid-range game — and was unguardable.
 
She went 14-of-26 from the floor, 9-of-14 in the second half. Nothing Campbell tried had any effect.
 
"Bella was something else," Camels coach Ronny Fisher said.
 
Not that Nascimento did it alone. Fifth-year senior Rebekah Frisby-Smith had 12 points on 4-of-7 shooting from deep, including a buzzer-beater at the end of the third quarter to cut Campbell's lead to 53-49 going into the fourth.
 
Cassidy Geddes, playing on a bad ankle, had 10 points. Half of those came on consecutive possessions in the fourth quarter that turned a four-point deficit into a one-point lead.

Monet Dance, a scoring machine in the first three games, was held to four points on Sunday. But she had four rebounds, two assists and only one turnover in 36 minutes.
 
And there were the little things, which, of course, aren't really little. At halftime, Campbell was outrebounding W&M 28-16. In the second half, the Tribe won the boards 13-12. And a big part of that was W&M shooting 56% after halftime as opposed to 29.4% in the first 20 minutes.
 
And the turnovers. The Tribe had 37 of them in the two regular-season losses to Campbell. It had nine (while forcing 16) on Sunday.
 
But none of that figured to be significant 4 minutes and 15 seconds into the game, when Davis called her first timeout with her team trailing by two touchdowns. A jumper by Nascimento broke the drought, but the Tribe trailed by 11 at the end of the first quarter and by 11 as the clock neared triple zeroes in the second.
 
After a Campbell miss, Nascimento rebounded and raced the ball up the floor. About 40 feet and to the right of the basket, she flung the ball in that direction. It banked off the glass and dropped, and the halftime deficit was eight instead of 11.
 
Good for the psyche. But with 2:02 left in the third, Campbell's lead was back to double digits at 51-38. Time for the Tribe to fold? What kind of movie would that make?
 
Nascimento scored eight consecutive points, and it was a seven-point game when Frisby-Smith took a pass in the right corner with triple zeroes again approaching. She beat the buzzer with a 3-pointer, and astonishingly, Campbell's lead was now only four.
 
"Those were big moments," Nascimento said. "Those two shots elevated our energy and togetherness."
 
A 3-pointer by Geddes gave the Tribe its first lead, 56-55, with 6:45 left in the game. Campbell regained it, but Nascimento (of course) scored consecutive baskets at the rim to put W&M ahead 60-57 with 4:45 remaining.
 
The Camels twice cut the deficit to one, and the Tribe twice bumped it back to three — each time on Nascimento baskets. Her 16-footer with 11.7 seconds left made it 66-63.
 
"I just kept drawing plays to get to her midrange, because that is where she is best," Davis said. "Bella was locked in the whole time."
 
Campbell's Olivia Tucker missed a 3-pointer to tie, and Anahi-Lee Cauley rebounded with five seconds left to all but seal it. The game ended with Nascimento, right in front of her team's bench, throwing the ball toward the arena's roof as the celebration began.
 
It's fair to say the Tribe didn't always handle tight games with poise this season. Sunday afternoon, they did.
 
"It goes back to our veterans," Davis said. "We have two fifth-year seniors (Frisby-Smith and Kayla Beckwith) and two seniors (Nascimento and Cauley). … Today, it needed to be our veterans. They needed to lead us."
 
They did. And what a screenplay it could make.