“Northwestern is going to fight you to the end with the way they can shoot the ball,” MSU head coach Suzy Merchant said. “They have five people that can shoot three’s, you never feel 100 percent comfortable with that. I felt like we had it, but I just felt like you don’t want to get too lackadaisical and comfortable.”

MSU (17-8 overall, 8-6 Big Ten) got off to a hot start, slicing apart Northwestern’s zone defense to jump out to an 8-0 lead, forcing Wildcats head coach Joe McKeown to call a timeout.

Senior center Allyssa DeHaan scored MSU’s first four points. She finished with 12 points, seven rebounds and four blocks.

The Spartans kept the pressure on Northwestern (14-11, 5-9), but the Wildcats were making enough baskets to stop the game from turning into a blowout.

Senior center Lauren Aitch, who finished with 11 points, got hot early, scoring eight straight points for MSU, including two 3-point baskets. She had three 3-pointers in her career coming into the game.

Then it was sophomore guard Porschè Poole’s turn to start rolling. Out of a media timeout, the Spartans cashed in on a Wildcats’ turnover with a 3-pointer from Poole. She followed that with a fast-break layup after a block from junior guard Brittney Thomas to give MSU a 32-19 lead. Again, McKeown called timeout to stop the bleeding.

“She’s a really good playmaker and very good at getting to the hole,” Merchant said of Poole, who finished with a season-high 12 points. “She’s knocking down her (3-pointers) right now, too, which obviously makes her a little bit harder to guard.”

Poole said she felt comfortable on the court because the team felt it knew everything Northwestern was going to do.

She said teams now have to respect both her outside shot and her drive because of the time she’s put in on her 3-point shot.

“Today I was on,” she said.

MSU went up by as many as 17 in the first half, but Northwestern was able to cut its deficit to 11 points, with a score of 41-30, going into halftime.

Northwestern center Amy Jaeschke single-handedly kept the Wildcats in the game to start the second half.

She scored her team’s first 10 points but had to leave the game after picking up her fourth foul. With Jaeschke, Northwestern cut a 14-point second half deficit to seven. Once she had to go to the bench, MSU extended the lead to 14 on a 3-pointer by Poole and never looked back.

“They’re definitely a completely different team when she’s not on the floor,” Aitch said.

Jaeschke finished with a game-high 20 points in 30 minutes.

McKeown said when his team was trying to claw its way back into the game, its margin of error was thin.

“You can’t be missing free throws,” said McKeown, whose team shot 13-of-19 from the line.

“I felt like we were right there if we could just get some stops, make a couple shots, make free throws and we just didn’t do it.”

MSU also did a much better job on Northwestern guard Meshia Reed, who was the Wildcats’ main catalyst when the two teams first met. She scored a season-high 13 points in that game, getting to the lane and drawing contact en route to shooting eight free-throws. This time around, the Spartans held her to six points, and she only got to the line twice.

“We did a nice job of not fouling her this time,” Merchant said.

“I thought last time she did a great job of creating contact. She got away from us and that was a little disappointing to us the first time that we played them. I thought we chased them a little too much. She was kind of the key to that. She got them going there.”

The Spartans host Illinois at 7 p.m. Thursday.