INDIANAPOLIS — In a season riddled with heartbreak, the Michigan women’s basketball team thought its fortunes had finally changed.

After losing to Indiana in the Wolverines' last regular-season game, they led the Hoosiers by 12 at one point during the second half of yesterday's Big Ten Tournament first-round contest.

But the pressure of the postseason and Indiana's full-court defense led to a 68-50 Michigan loss.

“Every time someone has pressured us this year, we’ve struggled,” Michigan coach Kevin Borseth said. “That’s really what the problem has been from the get-go. People put pressure on us, and we’re not strong enough to handle that. It really surfaced today.”

With 14 minutes left last Sunday in Bloomington, Michigan led Indiana by 14. But the Wolverines fell apart down the stretch, eventually losing 67-61.

Just four days later and 50 miles south of their most recent disappointment, Michigan (3-15 Big Ten, 10-20 overall) blew another lead.

And that’s been the story all season for the Wolverines, who ended the season on an eight-game losing streak. Michigan led or was tied late in 11 of its 16 losses to Big Ten teams, including last night's game.

The 15-loss regular-season conference slate evokes memories of three seasons ago, when the program went 0-16 in Big Ten play.

A year later, Michigan hired Borseth, who promised he would establish a tradition of women’s basketball in Ann Arbor. The Wolverines responded with a 19-win season and a trip to the WNIT quarterfinals.

But this season, Michigan struggled to finish games.

“I don’t even know how many games we were either close or tied with just a few minutes left in the game,” freshman point guard Courtney Boylan said. “We just couldn’t close them out. We couldn’t all season.”

Against Indiana, the Wolverines dominated the first 25 minutes on both sides of the floor. Michigan started the game with a 12-0 run and held the Hoosiers (12-7, 19-9) scoreless for the first seven minutes of the game. The large Indiana contingent of fans who was only an hour away from Bloomington was mostly quiet.

Junior center Krista Phillips penetrated the paint and used her height advantage to score 13 points in the game’s first 25 minutes. And senior forward Carly Benson made three 3-pointers in the same time frame.

Hoosier coach Felicia Legette-Jack said that Benson looked like “the solution to (Michigan’s) team” in the first half.

But with the pressure on from the Indiana full-court press, Benson and Phillips scored a combined two points in the game’s final 15 minutes.

“We couldn’t figure it out,” senior point guard Jessica Minnfield said. “Our passes were either too short or too long, and we couldn’t even get the ball on our side of the court. It was frustrating.”

At one point, the pressure caused three consecutive turnovers on the the Wolverines' side of the court and a momentum swing from which they couldn't recover.

“That was the entire game — the press,” Borseth said with his head in his hands. “It was all about the press.”

With a long offseason ahead, Borseth and the Wolverines will need to retool a frustrated team that will lose four seniors, three of them starters.

“It’s going to go in the right direction,” Borseth said. “This might have been a step backwards. But I look at where it was two years ago, and there were a lot of games where the program never had a chance. And this season, there weren’t many games that we weren’t in.

“It’s going to work. It’s only a matter of time before it happens.”