The New York Liberty are moving on in the WNBA playoffs after a hard-fought series against the Washington Mystics.

The Liberty won both games in the best-of-three series but the Mystics went down swinging. After running away with Game 1 in the second half, Game 2 went into overtime as Washington fought off an 11-point deficit at halftime. Mystics star Natasha Cloud talked a lot of trash and backed it up with a spirited, 33-point performance. Breanna Stewart's 27 points paved the way for a New York victory.

After already winning the Commissioner's Cup and smashing the franchise record in regular-season wins, the Liberty won their first playoff series since 2015. While it wasn’t fresh on the players' minds during the hard-fought game, it does mean something to them, according to Doug Feinberg of the Associated Press.

“It means a lot. I don’t know if we’re thinking about it,” Stewart said, via AP. “Today there were highs and lows. We knew it was going to be emotional. D.C. was going to go out swinging. We stayed the course. We didn’t stop playing until the final buzzer.”

The Liberty assembled a superteam this past offseason by signing Stewart and Courtney Vandersloot and trading for Jonquel Jones, adding three stars to a team that already boasted Ionescu and Betnijah Laney. They have championship expectations and ambitions. The road is long to winning the first WNBA championship in franchise history but so far in 2023, so good.

The intensity between the two sides made the series exhilarating but it didn’t include any ill intent from either side. After the game, Cloud expressed her respect for Ionescu and the two hugged it out after the final buzzer. Stewart knows that the playoffs spawn high-intensity games and heated moments.

“It definitely got spicy,” Stewart said, according to Brian Lewis of New York Post. “There was some missed calls, some no-calls, things like that. Both teams want to win. [Liberty forward Betnijah Laney] got a tech. But that’s playoff basketball.”

The Liberty will return to action on Sunday and will face either the Connecticut Sun (Jones' former squad) or the Minnesota Lynx.