The Maddy Siegrist Show is now part of March Madness

Her points pile up, her records pile on. Cleveland State had various schemes in mind to stop Maddy Siegrist. In practice, they amounted to a close-up view of the Maddy Siegrist Show.

Into the NCAA Tournament now, this show goes national. Siegrist, Villanova’s first-team all-American, the nation’s leading scorer, has a reputation that resonates. After Villanova had dispatched Cleveland State Saturday in the NCAA first round, Siegrist good for 35 points, Vikings forward Brittni Moore was asked if she was surprised Siegrist was guarding her. Moore chose a different word.

“Honestly, I was kind of honored,” Moore said later. “I was like, ‘OK, I feel kind of important.’”

» READ MORE: How God and basketball teamed up to create Maddy Siegrist’s historic career at Villanova

Let’s get this out of the way: Villanova ain’t some one-woman show. Opening get-the-jitters-out minutes were a little primer on how so many Wildcats contributed to a No. 4 region seed.

If you were inside the Finneran Pavilion, you saw Villanova missing early shots, Christina Dalce grabbing offensive rebounds. More shots, more misses, more Dalce rebounds. When ‘Nova heated up, it was Kaitlyn Orihel igniting off the bench with deep shots. As soon as Bella Runyan got in, she offered her particular blend of textbook and demonic defending. All important clues to how Villanova got to 28-6 this season, and is moving on, winning 76-59.

But Maddy Siegrist, you may have heard, is the show.

Cleveland State plays mostly zone. What it kind of did was offer Siegrist an opportunity to pick her own spots. You’d see Siegrist start down on the low block, get up the foul-line area. Passes got to her too easily, nobody fronting her, as she put up those 35 points in 36 minutes.

Once Siegrist has the basketball, your options deteriorate rapidly. Sometimes, you’ll get a quick shot out of her. Other times, she surveys her options, ball kept high, a defender surely viewing it unfold with a sense of dread. Her best option, often a mid-range jumper. (Swish.)

How many games was Siegrist’s not Villanova’s leading scorer this season? Go with zero. The scoring records start to sound almost mundane. The third quarter, she scored her 1,000th point. Career? No, this season. The fifth player in NCAA Division I history to pull that off.

She came in averaging 28.9 points a game and was higher than that midway through the third quarter, well past another milestone, tying Kelsey Plum’s NCAA record of 35 straight games scoring at least 20 points.

The Maddy Siegrist Show is not some exhibition, for entertainment purposes only. You see Siegrist’s fire when she misses. Early second half, she had the ball and found a baseline path, the degree of difficulty for her shot not high, but the ball went in and out. Siegrist clapped her hands and yelled at herself.

Keeping the ball high is a Siegrist trademark. It often renders double-teams ineffective. Getting to her isn’t getting to the ball.

“She has a very high release — I actually admire that, that’s really cool,” said Moore, a Cleveland State senior. “If I could do that, I would do that.”

» READ MORE: Maddy Siegrist has Villanova’s scoring mark, and a special bond with Sister Rose Marie, the old record-holder

That high release is a subject of natural attention. A New York Times reporter asked Villanova coach Denise Dillon if she’d seen another player with such a consistently high release point. “Yeah, Larry Bird was pretty good at it,” Dillon said, adding that she wasn’t sure if Siegrist had ever watched Bird.

In fact, at the Big East’s preseason media day, Siegrist had been asked whom she modeled her game after. She talked about how she finds such questions funny. She watches everyone. But she did say this: “My dad’s a big Larry Bird fan. Obviously he was done playing by the time I was born. But I really liked watching his highlights, how he played.”

Cleveland State coach Chris Kielsmeier, whose Horizon League champions finished 30-5, mentioned about ‘Nova: “They don’t see a lot of zone. It was really hard to get a high degree of probability of what we were going to see today, outside the common sense — Maddy was going to get a lot of shots, and score a lot, regardless of how we defend her, if we let her catch the ball a lot.”

They needed to do a better job of keeping her out of space, the coach said.

“She was able to get the ball in the mid-post, high-post area a lot more than we wanted,” Kielsmeier said.

“It’s hard to guard a moving target, as Coach always says,” Siegrist said.

When Siegrist got hers and Orihel and Runyan made 6 of 11 threes off the bench, the final score was fine print, Villanova advancing to face Florida Gulf Coast in Monday’s second round.

In some ways, maybe the hardest attention now comes off the court. The Maddy Siegrist Show is a winner, especially with Villanova’s women’s team the only Big 5 team, men or women, in March Madness.

“I’m so glad that our team is getting so much publicity this year,” Siegrist said. “Women’s sports are really hot right now. Women’s basketball is continuing to take off.”

For her part of it, Maddy Siegrist, now the show but the human being, said whatever she can do to help her team and help all the women who play basketball and all the young girls – “if they can see somebody like that and look up to that.”

Siegrist added, “I always try to remind myself that, when sometimes it gets — it seems like a lot, and a little too much — I just remember if you can impact one little kid’s life, then it’s worth it.”