With just more than 10 minutes to play on Saturday afternoon, it looked like the UA women’s basketball team was going to break its five-year drought against ASU.

How quickly the tables can turn.

ASU trailed for nearly 30 minutes of the game, but the Sun Devils stormed back to beat the Wildcats 57-49 at Wells Fargo Arena and notch their 10th straight win over their in-state rival.

“It just shows, I think, that we’re taking another step forward as a team,” ASU senior forward Kayli Murphy said. “We’ve done a lot of growing this season, and just to [come back] on your home floor against your rival, it just means so much.”

After UA (13-12, 6-8 Pac-10) took its largest lead of the game at 38-30 on a pair of free throws by junior forward Soana Lucet with 10:22 remaining, the Sun Devils (16-9, 8-6 Pac-10) ripped off a 10-0 run to grab their first lead since the contest’s opening minutes.

The biggest spark behind the ASU run was sophomore guard Alex Earl, who hit back-to-back 3-pointers to give the Sun Devils the 40-38 advantage with 8:16 to play.

“My dad always taught me a good shooter never quits shooting,” Earl said. “You miss a couple, [and] you’ll make a couple. That’s one of my roles on the team is if I’m open and we’ve worked the ball a little bit, I’ve got to shoot it. We needed [those shots], so I tried to hit them.”

Earl then hit another trifecta at the 4:06 mark that made the score 47-44 and gave ASU the lead for good.

“She was huge,” ASU coach Charli Turner Thorne said. “This is the role that we’ve been grooming Alex for — [to be a] stopper [and a] shooter. She fulfilled it to the nth degree — about as well as she could have possibly fulfilled it. It was great to see her come back in the second half and just look for her shot and knock them down.”

Also helping fuel ASU’s comeback was that the Sun Devils committed just one turnover in the second half and a season-low eight in the game.

UA controlled virtually the entire first half, as a jumper by senior guard Ashley Frazier ignited a 9-0 run by the Wildcats to grab a 13-7 lead with 14:37 left to play before the break. The Wildcats led by as many as seven in the period and took a 25-19 advantage into the locker room — largely due to their 25-13 edge on the boards.

A visibly more energized Sun Devil team then cut the lead to two points on two occasions in the second half’s opening minutes before the Wildcats built the 38-30 advantage midway through the frame.

“It’s a tough game to lose, especially when you feel like you have control for about 30 minutes of the basketball game,” UA coach Niya Butts said. “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to finish plays …we made plays for about 30 minutes, and then after that, we didn’t make many.”

UA junior forward Ify Ibekwe, who came into the game as the only player in the Pac-10 averaging a double-double, grabbed 17 rebounds but was limited to four points on just five field-goal attempts.

“We worked all week in practice just in denying her, because if you deny a great player the basketball, she doesn’t have the chance to put it in the basket,” Murphy said. “We were just really trying to be aggressive with her, deny her the ball and then box her out.”

ASU’s defense also held UA freshman guard Davellyn Whyte, the Pac-10’s fifth-leading scorer, to 10 points on just 2-of-18 shooting.

“They did the best job that they’ve done all year long in denying [a team’s top two scorers the ball],” Turner Thorne said. “That’s our defense, that you’re supposed to deny one pass away, and we haven’t been really good at it consistently this year with our youthfulness. We worked on it a lot this week, and they did a great job.”

Lucet scored eight of her 12 points in the first half for UA and also added 10 rebounds.

Senior guard Danielle Orsillo, junior forward Becca Tobin and redshirt freshman forward Janae Fulcher each scored 10 points for the Sun Devils.

ASU junior guard Tenaya Watson missed her third straight game with a foot injury, and freshman Sabrina McKinney filled in again at the starting point guard spot.

Reach the reporter at gina.mizell@asu.edu