OKLAHOMA CITY (Feb. 28, 2016) – The framed boxscore from Feb. 28, 1986, hangs in Oklahoma Christian coach Stephanie Findley's office, and even now, three decades after it happened, it's still mesmerizing for those who stop to look at it.

The numbers seem impossible for any basketball team – 39 made field goals on 49 attempts, for a remarkable 79.6 shooting percentage. On a night the Lady Eagles played their biggest game of the season – shoot, one of the most important in the program's history – to that point, away from home, they posted a performance that to this day remains among the best in collegiate history.

The result – a 92-68 rout of a Cameron team that was 24-4 and had won 18 straight games – gave the Lady Eagles their first (and only) NAIA District 9 title and propelled them a step closer to the program's first national-tournament appearance. At the time, that's what was important to the players.

But as the years have passed, they have gained a special appreciation for what they accomplished that night in Lawton.

"I knew we shot it well but had no idea what the numbers were at the time," said Sherri (Buben) Coale, then OC's starting point guard and now the coach at Oklahoma, one who's to be inducted this summer into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame. "I remember being so excited about winning district, taking pictures with teammates and celebrating. I do remember seeing a stat sheet, which we never saw back then, but I had no idea that what we had done was so very hard to do.

"Looking back on it now, I'm amazed. What an honor to be a small piece of that puzzle."

First, the particulars: OC's mark remains in the NAIA record book (although it took until 1996 for it to be listed – a story in itself). It was an all-division women's record until Jan. 3, 2013, when Albany State (Ga.) shot 81.1 percent against Kentucky State, going 30 of 37 from the field to set the NCAA Division II mark.

The 1985-86 season was Findley's first as OC's head coach. It was an era of high-level competition in NAIA women's hoops in Oklahoma. Southwestern Oklahoma State had won three of the previous four NAIA championships and by the end of the '80s, Southwestern would win a fourth title and two other Oklahoma programs (Oklahoma City University and Southern Nazarene) also would win national championships.

OC, with five seniors in its playing rotation, split with Cameron during the regular season and entered the District 9 playoffs as the No. 2 seed. The Lady Eagles beat Northeastern State 75-61 at home in the quarterfinals, then ended Southwestern's postseason run with a 64-53 win in a semifinal showdown in the Eagles' Nest.

Cameron, ranked No. 8 in the NAIA, was the top seed, so the Lady Eagles headed southwest on Interstate 44 to Lawton to play in the Aggie Gym. Then, and now, Cameron's gym could be described as somewhat of a bandbox, with little room on the sidelines. It's also relatively dark and not considered to be a great shooting gym for visiting teams.

In that era, there were no at-large national-tournament berths, meaning only the district champion advanced in the NAIA postseason, so there was no safety net for the Lady Eagles, even though they entered the game with a 24-7 record and a 15-game winning streak.

One of OC's star players, senior Jan Ross, had been slowed late in the season by a stress fracture in her foot that made her miss the Lady Eagles' next-to-last regular-season game. With Spring Sing (a popular student-produced variety show) in full throat back on the OC campus, few of the team's fans were in the stands to cheer on the Lady Eagles. OC entered the title game as a decided underdog.

But the Lady Eagles didn't play like it. Sue (Rother) Bond was a freshman that came off the bench for OC and sensed early in the game that something special was happening.

"It was fun on the bench watching our starters hit everything they put up," Bond said. "There was a rowdy group of Cameron students leaning over the railing heckling us from the start, so we were having fun watching these guys become subdued as our starters made shot after shot."

The game was competitive early. Cameron led 20-19 with 8:48 left in the first half, but OC closed the half on a 27-6 run and led 46-26 at halftime. The Lady Eagles, to that point, had hit 19 of 25 shots, an even 76 percent.

Then they heated up. In the second half, OC made 20 of 24 field-goal attempts, an 83.3-percent clip. Cameron came no closer than 14 points, at 70-56 with five minutes left.

"I remember thinking we were not going to be stopped, no matter what," said Ross, who's now Coale's top assistant coach at Oklahoma. "We were all so immersed in the game and in our goal of getting to the national tournament.

"We were having so much fun. I didn't have any idea we were setting a record. I had no idea we were shooting that well. We were just rolling and we knew it. I don't think I even knew until we watched the sports shows after the game that we shot so well."

Bond said by game's end, "even the hecklers knew they had witnessed something special and cheered when we left the court."

The man who kept the game statistics, Herb Jacobs of the Lawton Constitution – asked this past November about the game – said simply, "They just didn't miss much that night."

Then-Cameron coach Billy Carter had a similar sentiment 30 years ago: "There's not a team in the NAIA that could have beaten them tonight," he said. "That was a once-in-a-lifetime performance."

Ross and All-American Pam Kelly scored 22 points each to lead OC, with Ross going 8-of-11 from the field and Kelly going 10-of-13. Starting center Dawn Fischer was 7-of-9 from the field and scored 15 points. Shooting guard Melinda Savage made all four of her shots and scored 11 points, while Coale was 3-of-4.

The freshmen were perfect – Lisa Landrum went 2-of-2 while Bond made her only shot. Alice (Clark) Richardson, Lissy Brown and Gina Huffman also went 1-of-1 from the field, while Denise (Findley) Childress was 1-of-2. LaTitia Taylor also played for the Lady Eagles but didn't shoot.

The Lady Eagles, coincidentally, went 14-of-19 from the free-throw line (73.7 percent).

Findley, now in her 31st year at the OC helm and closing in on 600 wins, said that game – her entire first season, to be honest – will always rank as one of her career highlights.

"It was a great night," she said. "Everything was simple, it seemed like. Everything was so easy, because the shots were falling. We had a lot of seniors who knew what was going on and how to play and all I had to do was sit over there and enjoy it that year in the playoffs. We just rolled that night."

One OC fan quickly made a handwritten championship banner for team members to pose with after the game and a few took snapshots. The mood in the vans on the ride back to Oklahoma City was jubilant, said Landrum, who became a NAIA All-American three years later as a senior.

The excitement was palpable back on campus, too. At the Spring Sing show that Friday night, the crowd in Hardeman Auditorium erupted when the score was announced and an impromptu welcome celebration was put together.

"I remember coming into the parking lot (outside the Eagles' Nest) and being met by campus police and a whole host of fans that were there to meet us when we arrived," Landrum said. "It was a very special feeling."

As exciting as the win was, it still didn't qualify OC for the NAIA tournament, which then included only 16 teams. A few days later, the Lady Eagles traveled to Dodge City, Kan., to beat the Kansas NAIA district champion, St. Mary of the Plains, and earn a trip to Kansas City, Mo., for the national event.

Once there, OC rolled past Wisconsin-Green Bay (in recent years a NCAA Division I power) before the magic run ended against Georgia Southwestern in the quarterfinals.

An epilogue to the story: Findley always assumed OC's shooting performance against Cameron was a NAIA record. But about 10 years later, a local reporter called to ask her if she still had a copy of the boxscore.

Turns out, no one from OC (which didn't have a full-time sports information director until the late 1990s), or the Sooner Athletic Conference or District 9, had reported the record to the NAIA, and thus it hadn't been listed in the record book. The national organization wanted a boxscore as verification, which Findley was only too happy to produce.

The same boxscore that now hangs in her office, a pleasant memory of a special game.

Stephanie Findley talks about the Cameron game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vY_QZhLuWE&feature=em-upload_owner