A pearl found its way into the bagful of disappointments that the Ohio State women’s basketball team brought home on Thursday night from a 66-65 loss at Illinois.

Sophomore center Ashley Adams nearly rescued the 10th-ranked Buckeyes (21-3, 8-3 Big Ten) from another road disaster by playing one of the most complete games of her career.

Her statistical line read 18 points, nine rebounds, five blocks, four assists and three steals in 40 minutes. Along the way to tying a career high in points, Adams connected on 9 of 10 shots from the field.

The loss, however, had Adams concentrating on things beyond her own growing production during practice on Friday.

“We need to get better as a team, I think,” she said. “I get better at practice. We all get better at practice. We just need to bring (our play) up more so that we don’t have any more losses like that.”

The need is pressing with a 5 p.m. meeting today at Value City Arena against Big Ten-leading Purdue (19-5, 9-2) in a breast-cancer awareness game. Only five games remain in the regular season.

“I feel like there isn’t much room for this team to lose,” Adams said. “We need to finish strong the rest of the year. Purdue is just going to be another game, but at the same time, we need to finish strong. Losing at home would be a very big disappointment. Coach (Jim) Foster has nine losses at home, I think.”

The nine-loss reference for Foster is since the 2004-05 season. The Buckeyes are 129-9 at home over those years and 16-0 this season. Even so, home doesn’t seem as safe.

The Boilermakers play the same type of smothering defense that helped the Illini rally from a 12-point deficit in the final eight minutes to upset the Buckeyes. The late surge included six offensive rebounds, something that Adams noticed.

“We got outrebounded (36-28),” she said. “I feel like if we would have rebounded better, then we would have won.”

She has improved her rebounding technique this season. At Siloam Springs (Ark.) High School, Adams (6 feet 5) usually was the tallest player on the court.

“I could just reach up and grab the ball,” she said. “Now I’m using more two hands and jumping. The players are a lot tougher here.”

Minnesota and Illinois demonstrated that toughness in defeating the Buckeyes the past two weeks. Those teams also took advantage of seemingly every OSU breakdown at both ends of the court. Foster noticed this trend again on Thursday.

“It’s more how we did certain things, in my opinion,” Foster said. “At this stage of the season, you shouldn’t be fundamentally making mistakes.

“You’re going to be in physical games: adjust to it. You’re going to be in games where a player is not there: adjust to it. We didn’t. We let it bother us for long chunks of time. During those chunks of time is when they made significant runs.”

Guards Samantha Prahalis and Tayler Hill combined for 12 assists in the game, but also committed 12 of the team’s 21 turnovers.

Foster saw many of the errors as “unforced.”

“There were just a lot of bad turnovers,” he said.

jmassie@dispatch.com