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UCLA senior point guard Nikki Blue celebrates a basket in the first half of her team’s 74-6

It had tightened its grip on Nikki Blue a little more with each passing year.

Moments after her club’s 74-61 win over Bowling Green in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament, the senior guard no longer felt that lingering pain.

“It’s a big monkey to get off my back,” Blue said.

UCLA women’s basketball captured its first tournament win in seven years, and Blue no longer has to answer questions about why her team hadn’t experienced any success past February. The fifth-seeded Bruins (21-10) beat the 12th-seeded Falcons (28-3) in a game that has mirrored Blue’s team over her four years – inconsistent, but always entertaining.

The Bruins were dazzling at times, as the trio of Blue, junior guard Noelle Quinn and senior guard Lisa Willis revealed an athleticism Bowling Green hadn’t seen all year. They were also uninspiring at times, losing focus on defense and committing frivolous turnovers.

“That wasn’t our best basketball,” Blue said. “But we did what we needed to do to win the game.”

UCLA is now set to play fourth-seeded Purdue on Tuesday night on the Boilermakers’ home court in West Lafayette, Ind. All four favorites in the top half of the Cleveland subregional advanced, as top-seeded North Carolina will take on eighth-seeded Vanderbilt in the Commodores’ home arena.

With all the prospects of moving through a daunting bracket, the Bruins just wanted to avoid upset and get through the first game relatively unscathed.

“We were all anxious to get back (to the tournament), but we got all the jitters of out of the way,” Blue said. “We are looking forward to Purdue.”

Bowling Green had won a nation-best 19 straight games and had held its opponent to under 70 points in each game this season. Both streaks were snapped by UCLA, which used its speed and strength in transition to send Bowling Green home with a double-digit loss in the first round.

Purdue (25-6) offers a bigger challenge, with its talent and home-court advantage. Whereas the inside presence of Ali Mann and Liz Honegger helped Bowling Green earn some easy points in the paint, it also meant that UCLA had many more athletic and versatile players on the court at any given moment of the game.

The Bruins won’t have that luxury in the second round. Aya Traore and Erin Lawless lead an explosive Boilermaker team that erased a 10-point deficit to Missouri State at halftime, quickly turning it into a 23-point lead midway through the second half.

Traore finished with 20 points and 11 rebounds, while Lawless chimed in with 19 points.

“They are a much better basketball team (than Bowling Green), and we are going to have to play better,” UCLA coach Kathy Olivier said. “We scored 74 points and didn’t play well (on Sunday), and we played loose in the second half.

“We talked about the first game being a build-up to (the) Purdue game, and that’s exactly what it was. Now we have to take it up a notch.”

It will be an emotionally charged game for Olivier. She was excited last week at the prospect of facing Purdue coach Kristy Curry, who she characterized as “one of my three closest friends in women’s basketball.”

As her team took the court in warmups, Olivier hugged Curry by the sidelines after Purdue’s win over Missouri State.

“I have the utmost respect for Kristy as a coach (for) what she’s done with that program,” Olivier said. “We each want to win that game, but afterwards we’ll still be friends. It’ll be easier to shake hands with her after a win, though.”

There is some history between UCLA and Purdue, which will be meeting for the third time in three years. In December 2003, the then-No. 8 Boilermakers won a thrilling 58-57 game over the Bruins in Indianapolis when Beth Jones hit a 3-pointer with 1.8 seconds left. The Bruins evened the score last season when they defeated the Boilermakers 70-64 in Pauley Pavilion.

“It really doesn’t matter that it’s their home court,” Willis said. “People can make a big deal about it, but we know that if we stay focused, we can beat anybody on any court.”