This post was written by Hatchet staff writer Josh Solomon.

The two top-scoring scoring and rebounding teams in the Atlantic 10 finished the regular season with a highly contested game.

How high? The two combined for 167 total points and 83 total rebounds.

By the end, it was the Colonials who pulled out an 88-79 win against No. 21 Dayton on senior day.

Two of those “seniors” – graduate students Danni Jackson and Megan Nipe – had their most emotional moment, not during the pre-game festivities that celebrated their five-year careers at GW, but in the games final minutes when their teammates stood at the free throw line icing the game.

The win clinched a top four spot in the A-10 standings, a double-bye into the conference tournament’s quarterfinals and gave GW its first 20-win season since 2007-08.

“I don’t know what she said because I wasn’t listening, but I just kept putting my head on her shoulder,” Jackson said. “I didn’t want everybody to see how big my smile was so I don’t know if she said anything.”

“I was basically just like ‘Good job guys, we did it,’ and then the second thing I told her was that she stunk and she should get off me,” Nipe jokingly said of her five-year teammate.

It was the first time the Colonials had defeated Dayton in their careers and the first time GW had done so since 2009. They had lost to the Flyers 90-69 in Ohio earlier this season, so Tsipis made sure his team was reminded of the 13 threes Dayton had knocked down. GW used a mixture of man and a 2-3 zone defense to limit the Flyers to 7-26 shooting from behind the arc.

“I didn’t have to say a lot after Wednesday night. That bus ride and coming back home and everything, they were chomping at the bit to get another chance at Dayton,” Tsipis said.

Jackson and Nipe provided the punch in the first half. Nipe, who had been the team’s sixth man as of late, got the start in favor of freshman Hannah Schaible, putting her on the bench to start a game for the first time all season. Tsipis said he had planned that out for the past three weeks, but didn’t say if the lineup change would continue in the A-10 tournament.

It paid off though. Nipe nailed four of her seven 3-pointers in the half, while Schaible contributed with two points, two assists, two steals and four rebounds – two offensive boards.

Meanwhile, GW’s bigs went to work, systematically defeating the Flyers.They out-rebounded them 49-34 and outscored them 28-12 in paint in the second half. Sophomore Jonquel Jones finished with a team-high 22 points, feeling her turnaround jumper all game long. She would also add 13 rebounds.

Freshman Caira Washington was plagued with foul trouble in the first half, but her aggressive presence in the first five minutes of the game stuck with the team the rest of the way through. She would end up with 18 points and 12 rebounds, eight of which came on the offensive glass.

“She’s mature beyond her years,” Tsipis said of Washington. “After how she played in the St. Bonaventure game, as a coach, I knew she was going to play well today.”

With a little over four minutes to play in the game, after a back-and-forth second half, GW had started to pull away. On their next offensive possession, Jackson swung the ball to Nipe on the baseline, but instead of taking the trey, she passed it into Washington on the block. The ball deflected off Washington’s hands right to Jones on the other side of the paint, who then easily laid it up.

Dayton called a 30-second timeout and all Tsipis could do was grin in an ‘I can’t believe that just happened,’ kind of way. He realized his team was about to upset the Flyers.

The win also marked the first time GW has beaten two ranked opponents in the same season since 2007-08, when they would go onto win the conference and make it all the way to the Sweet 16.

The Colonials will go onto play March 7 at the Richmond Coliseum for the quarterfinals of the A-10 tournament. The goal all year has to been to raise a conference banner and with a win against the regular season champ, the road to doing so has become a little easier.

“Last year it was ‘We won a game, now we’re going to go play Dayton, oh, maybe we have a chance,’” Tsipis said. “Now I think our kids expected to walk in here and be able to compete tooth and nail.”