BANGOR — The Maine women’s basketball team had knocked off Louisiana State just two days earlier in Florida, so you could have excused the Black Bears for not exactly being locked in when they returned home for a game against Division III Colby.

Sluggish? Hardly.

Sigi Koizar nailed a 3-pointer 15 seconds into the game Tuesday night and Maine scored the first 18 points en route to an 82-42 shellacking of the Mules before an announced crowd of 1,365 at the Cross Insurance Center.

It was the third consecutive win for the Black Bears (6-3), who were finishing a stretch of five games in seven days. Maine used 14 players and all of them scored.

“We knew that they would fight back so we couldn’t take it easy on them, and also out of respect we had to play hard,” Koizar said after scoring a game-high 16 points.

Chantel Charles added 11 and Liz Wood scored eight to go with 13 rebounds. Maine raced to a 22-5 lead after one quarter and pasted the smaller Colby team 56-23 on the boards.

Colby Coach Julie Veilleux, a former UMaine player, put in a zone defense just for the occasion, fearing what the Black Bears could do in one-on-one situations against her shorter players.

“When you can play some beasts out there, you’re realizing the beasts we thought we were playing against weren’t necessarily as beastly,” Veilleux said after Colby’s first-ever game against a Division I foe.

“I think we’re at a good place mentally where it’s not going to kick the wind out of our sails.”

Colby (4-1) was led by nine points from Cony High graduate Mia Diplock.

Maine returned Monday from a three-game tournament in Florida and the team didn’t have a shootaround before Tuesday’s game so the players could get caught up on schoolwork. That built in some needed rest, Koizar said.

The Black Bears picked up some confidence at the Gulf Coast Showcase, losing to Dayton before rebounding to beat Missouri State and LSU. Koizar was named to the all-tournament team after scoring 30 points in the 69-65 win over Missouri State. The shifty junior guard is learning to be more selfish, to take over games when the matchups are favorable.

Charles, one of the eight seniors on the team, can sense a boost of needed swagger after winning four games in a week.

“We’re better than what we believe,” Charles said. “We need to be more confident on the court going out there.”

The only Black Bears who didn’t get to rest before Tuesday’s game were sophomores Christiana Gerostergiou, Kirsten Johnson and Parise Rossignol. None had been able to play in the first eight games because they hadn’t passed the mandatory conditioning test – running a mile in under 6½ minutes. All three completed that feat earlier Tuesday and got into the game in the fourth quarter. Each scored two points.