By Madie Chandler | FeverBasketball.com

Throughout a season of speed bumps and curveballs, the Indiana Fever consistently looked to the depth within the team for extra support. On Friday, down four guards and now Chloe Bibby, the Fever had to look again.

Except instead of looking deeper within the team, Lexie Hull looked deeper within herself, and emerged with a career performance – 23 points (career high), four rebounds, two assists, and two steals.

“We’re missing a few people,” Hull said. “So everyone’s got to do a little bit extra, be a little bit more aggressive offensively. That was my mindset going in, and obviously it feels good to see the ball go through the net.”

Hull’s opening quarter was electric – she knocked down back-to-back triples and shot 4-of-5 from the field en route to an 11-point quarter. By halftime she’d already eclipsed her previous season-high of 17 points as she entered the break with 18. Hull would finish with a new career-high 23 points.

When Minnesota’s coverage of Hull got tighter in the second half, Kelsey Mitchell stepped up.

Mitchell had a 14-point second half as she dropped in some critical buckets for the Fever. She finished with 27 points and five assists, including a 5-for-7 night from beyond the arc.

Indiana had just nine available players entering a matchup with the league-leading Lynx. A competitive matchup with the Lynx would take every bit of each available player, all together.

They came up just short in the end, falling to Minnesota, 95-90, as the Lynx curbed a two-game skid. Indiana trailed by as many as 14 points in the fourth quarter, but fought back to within five points after outscoring the Lynx in the fourth quarter, 21-13.

“Every day in our huddle, that’s what we say. ‘Together,’” Aliyah Boston said. “And it’s just more than words for us. I think when you see things happening, there’s just no other way…People are probably expecting us to just fold…and that’s not us.

“We come in the locker room and we’re motivated. We continue to be motivated. Every single time we step on that floor we’re motivated…And that’s our mindset. And just continue to uplift people. You know, when one person goes down, we say it all the time, the next woman stands up. And that’s really just been our motto and been what we’ve had to do a lot this season. And that’s what we’re just going to continue to do.”

They embodied that togetherness in Friday’s pregame window as each Fever player arrived wearing an “MVP Mitchell” shirt in support of Kelsey Mitchell’s case for league MVP. Indiana’s coaching staff wore the shirts for the duration of the game, and coach Stephanie White highlighted it in her postgame availability.

“I was very humbled,” Mitchell said. “I was grateful for my group. I love the people I play with. To know that they would go out of their way to make something like that happen for me, it means a lot more than people know…[I’ll] look at them like forever friends after something like that.”

The character and connection up and down the Indiana roster shows through any bad result. It’s a testament to the culture growing in Indianapolis – the environment thrives, rain or shine. No deficit is ever too daunting, no amount of adversity too powerful to dim the fiery belief of the Fever locker room.

“They battle every single game,” White said. “…This is a special group of women. What they’ve been going through and everything that they’ve had to continue to overcome…No matter what happens, win or lose, the roots that this group is forming culturally, the roots that they’re forming in terms of competitive spirit and what it means to to compete at this level, those are what allow us to withstand these storms. And, you know, the numbers tell a story, but their hearts and their character tell another one.”