COLLEGE PARK — As the horn sounded one last time inside Xfinity Center, signaling the end of a lab experiment dressed up as an epic game designed to test the limits of the human condition, walking became optional for Sarah Te-Biasu.

Sure, she danced a little, yelled a lot, her last puffs of energy pouring out of her ecstatically Monday night. But after a herculean performance in an improbable comeback win for the Maryland women’s basketball team, Te-Biasu had first bounded into the arms of teammate Saylor Poffenbarger, and no one in College Park would’ve been surprised to see one teammate after another ferry the graduate student guard from celebration to celebration, feting an unlikely NCAA tournament hero.

The fourth-seeded Terps’ 111-108 double-overtime win over fifth-seeded Alabama was a night of oh-so-much and just enough. The 219 combined points were the second most in women’s NCAA tournament history. The 17-point rally was Maryland’s largest in any game since 2019. Te-Biasu’s 49-plus minutes were a career high. The drama, the excess, the ear-splitting noise — was this a second-round game or a fever dream? Maybe not even the 5,000-plus in attendance could believe all that they saw to be true.

“Yeah, wow,” Maryland coach Brenda Frese said to open her postgame news conference, and it was hard to find a better summation of her past three hours. The Terps (25-7) led by as many as 10 points in the second quarter and trailed by double digits for close to half of the third and fourth quarters. They were down by three points in the final minute of regulation, only to force overtime. They were up by three in the final seconds of the first overtime period, only for the Crimson Tide (24-9) to force a second overtime. Back and forth the game went, hopelessly addicted to the March Madness that had consumed the Maryland men the night before.

The Terps' reward for their longest game in over a decade, and one of their wildest ever, is the team’s 12th Sweet 16 appearance under Frese and 17th overall. Maryland will face defending national champion and top-seeded South Carolina on Friday in Birmingham, Alabama. The game time has not been announced yet.

“It feels good,” said Te-Biasu, a 5-foot-5 Virginia Commonwealth transfer who finished with 26 points on 9-for-17 shooting, including a 5-for-7 mark from 3-point range, and added six assists and four rebounds. “It was really a fight. We went double overtime, but we just kept playing for each other the whole game. … We just kept fighting. That’s all we did.”

The Terps weren’t close to full strength entering Monday night, and their firepower only waned after tipoff.

Junior guard Bri McDaniel, who earned All-Big Ten Conference honorable mention last season and was Maryland’s top on-ball defender, tore her ACL in mid-January. Freshman point guard Kyndal Walker (hand), the Terps’ top recruit in last year’s class, is redshirting this season. Poffenbarger, a regular starter at guard and one of the team’s top rebounders, suffered an ankle injury in late February that has limited her through postseason play. And senior guard Shyanne Sellers, a projected WNBA draft pick, sprained her knee in January and has played most of the past two months with a bulky brace.

Foul trouble deepened the Terps’ woes. Senior forward Christina Dalce was charged with her second personal midway through the second quarter, and the Crimson Tide followed her exit with a surge to take a two-point halftime lead. Sellers got her fourth foul with Maryland down 59-45 midway through the third quarter, leaving the Terps without one of their best outside shooters and most versatile perimeter defenders. By then, the game seemed to belong to Alabama and senior guard Sarah Ashlee Barker, who would finish with a school-record 45 points on 17-for-25 shooting.

With score after score, however, and stop after stop, Maryland clawed its way back. When Sellers returned with about six minutes remaining in regulation, the deficit was just six. A put-back by graduate student wing Mir Mclean, a Baltimore native, cut the Crimson Tide’s lead to 80-78 with 1:27 remaining. After two tying free throws from Sellers (team-high 28 points), Te-Biasu traded 3s with Barker in the final minute to force overtime.

“We were giving it everything we had, as if we had nothing to lose, which we don’t,” Dalce said. “We don’t have anything to lose. It’s literally win or go home.”

But at the end of the first overtime, Maryland and Alabama found themselves back where they’d started. After Poffenbarger was fouled with six seconds remaining and Maryland leading 95-93, she stepped to the line with the opportunity to ice the game. She missed her first free throw. She hit the second.

As Alabama hurried upcourt on the ensuing possession, Frese elected not to foul and send the Crimson Tide to the foul line. But Poffenbarger did anyway, colliding with Barker as she contested a deep 3 with just under a second remaining. Barker hit all three free throws. Another overtime beckoned.

“I think any team that goes into two overtimes, had some of our players foul out, people diving on the floor — I think that we left everything we had out there tonight,” a tearful Barker said afterward.

The game reached its merciful end with even whiter knuckles. Maryland led for all of the second overtime, but sophomore guard Diana Collins got an open look from the corner with about five seconds remaining. Her 3-pointer was long, preserving Maryland’s 111-108 advantage as the ball caromed out of bounds. As the Terps and Crimson Tide retreated to their benches during an official’s review, McLean was sure she hadn’t touched the ball last. Replays appeared to agree with her.

“I was super confident that it was our ball,” she said. “Super confident.”

The officials disagreed. Alabama had one final possession underneath Maryland’s basket with 1.8 seconds remaining. The Crimson Tide never got a shot off, with Te-Biasu poking the inbounds pass back to graduate student forward Allie Kubek, who had 19 points, 12 rebounds and five assists in 49 marathon minutes.

The Terps celebrated as if they’d been waiting all night. Sellers, playing the last home game of a decorated career, bounced with teammates at midcourt. Dalce ran around blowing kisses to fans in every direction. Freshman forward Breanna Williams nearly carried McLean off the court. Dalce and junior forward Isimenme Ozzy-Momodu did carry Te-Biasu off the court, escorting her under a wave of applause and cheers as the Terps sauntered back to their locker room, grinning.

“I don’t even know why they do that, but it felt good,” said Te-Biasu, who played all but 18 seconds of the game. “It was helpful. I was a little bit tired, but it was good.”

“For what she did today, I said, ‘She can’t walk. She can rest her legs,’ ” Dalce said. “So that’s exactly what we did.”

In the locker room, the Terps reveled in their journey and their destination. As motivation, Maryland’s coaches had put up brackets predicting their second-round exit — including, apparently, brackets from Lola Bunny and Air Bud. Those were ripped down or heavily edited: “WRONG,” Dalce wrote on one. “BRACKET BUSTED,” she wrote on another.

As Frese joined the team in the locker room, a familiar tune preceded her arrival: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” The Terps had beaten the Crimson Tide to secure their place in Birmingham for the NCAA tournament’s second weekend.

It had taken a lot to get there. In a hallway outside the court, McLean (36 minutes) could barely recall what had just happened. “Exercise brain,” she called it. She remembered being tired in the first overtime, then getting a second wind in the second overtime. A pack of ice was strapped to both knees.

“This is March,” McLean said. “Physically, we may be beat up. All teams are physically beat up right now. But mentally, we’re locked in.”