Cougar women fall at Portland.

Changing routine always makes you feel like something isn’t right, but a light day of women’s basketball news makes it easier to right the ship.

On the local front, there was only one game yesterday - Washington State falling in a big hole early before rallying to a close loss at Portland . No games tonight, Saturday Idaho is at Santa Barbara, Eastern Washington at Boise State; Sunday it’s No. 3 Stanford at Gonzaga at 2 p.m. Less than 900 tickets remain. The Cardinal is at Utah tonight.

The local watch is below.

Usually I blog & tweet first thing in the morning. I postponed that as I got in well before sunrise to work on three different stories, including Stanford-Gonzaga, which will appear in the Saturday or Sunday paper, depending on space. (Will be tweeting, SRtrim if you want the updates.) The peace and quiet helped, especially for an interesting Then and Now type story I’m working on for Thanksgiving and transcribing some hockey interviews. Still casting about for a lead item for next week’s first women’s basketball notebook and I’m open to suggestions.

Angie Bjorklund (University) had a big game in a Tennessee win over Virginia. For the first time in her brief three-game career, Kate Loper (Post Falls) wasn’t among the Hofstra leaders in a win. Tweeted this early game yesterday, Portland wins OT thriller at Santa Barbara with solid games from Kelli Valentine (Mead) and Lexi Bishop (Shadle Park).

Zoe Scott (U-Hi) led The Masters in scoring in her first official collegiate game, scoring 17 points. She is averaging 10.5 points in 25 minutes off the bench in two games. … Kirsi Voshell is second in scoring (13.5) and first in rebounding (8.3) for 4-0 LC State.