South Carolina – 57, Georgia – 48. Well…bummer. This would’ve been a good one to get…but the Lady Bulldogs (16-4, 6-1 in SEC play) saw their six-game winning streak in conference competition come to an end tonight in Columbia. Two points separated the Lady Dawgs and Gamecocks at halftime and neither team looked capable of making a run to put the game away until the final five minutes. That’s when Carolina scored 14 of the game’s final 21 points to seal the deal. J.J. bounced back in a big way from her injury-impaired short performance against Mississippi State Sunday, scoring 15 points and grabbing a half-dozen rebounds. Po’ finished with 10 points and 9 boards, just missing a double-double. The challenge now for the Lady Bulldogs will be to make this loss a one-and-done situation. We’ve seen in the past couple of seasons how that first SEC loss has had a troubling tendency to cause a bit of a tailspin. Georgia is still in the midst of a stretch of very winnable SEC games. This isn’t the time for a losing streak…especially as wide-open as the race for those four coveted first-round SEC Tournament byes is shaping up to be.

Baton Rouge isn’t on anybody’s list of favorite places to go to bounce back from a tough loss…but that’s what the Lady Bulldogs will attempt to do this Sunday as they take on LSU in a nationally televised (ESPN2) showdown. We’ll have a Georgia/LSU preview posted right here sometime during the day on Saturday.

Click here for the official Georgia/South Carolina recap and a link to the stats and box score.