LEWISTON – Considering that they met as consensus NCAA Division III Top 25 women’s basketball teams for the third straight November, the University of Southern Maine and Bates College have heard ample chatter about whom they don’t have in their lineups.

If USM can keep its two healthy, established stars from hurting each other, the Huskies will be fine. And the Bobcats showed everyone Tuesday night in sticky Alumni Gymnasium that they’ll be around for the long haul this winter, too.

Katie Sibley scored a career-high 25 points, while senior classmate and All-American Ashley Marble added 23 to propel Southern Maine to an 87-77 victory in an early-season, inter-conference showdown.

Sibley and Marble combined for 31 points in the second half, when Southern Maine (3-0) fattened a four-point halftime lead to 16 before weathering a late Bates rally. Sibley, a 5-foot-5 point guard and the only captain in uniform for USM, played with purple swelling under both eyes, a nasty scratch between her eyebrows and nothing protecting her broken nose.

She suffered the injury in Saturday’s win over the University of Maine at Farmington when Marble went up for a rebound with her trademark aggression and inadvertently elbowed Sibley in the face.

“The trainers told me my eyes were open but that I was unresponsive for about 30 seconds. I told them I just didn’t feel like responding,” Sibley said. “I just told (Marble) she can break my nose before every game if we play like this.”

Stacey Kent added 11 points and Lauren Samuelson notched nine for the Huskies, who lost co-captain Shannon Kynoch to a season-ending knee injury during the preseason. Marble is playing with a sore right ankle and wasn’t cleared to play until last Thursday, a day before USM’s season opener.

Likewise, Bates (2-1) is without All-American Meg Coffin after she suffered a torn knee ligament late in soccer season. Bates dealt with a double-whammy when explosive junior Matia Kostakis spent almost the entire game neck-deep in foul trouble.

Kostakis led the Bobcats with 16 points, but she played only four minutes in the second half and 15 in all before fouling out with 4:15 remaining.

“She was hitting every shot she took from everywhere on the court,” said Marble, who drew the primary defensive duty against Kostakis. “I was just trying to play straight-up, good ‘D’, and once she got into foul trouble, as a post player myself, I knew she would play timid. That last foul was huge.”

The Bobcats trailed 69-53 with 11 minutes to go. They whittled the deficit to five, 75-70, when Sarah Barton hit the second of two free throw attempts with 5:27 left.

Just over a minute later, Val Beckwith missed inside and Kostakis drew an over-the-back call during the rebounding action. With Kostakis sidelined, Bates went more than five minutes without a field goal while Southern Maine (28-of-33 from the free-throw line) slowly and surely salted it away.

Beckwith added 12 points for Bates. Barton scored her 10 points in the second half to complement nine assists.

Katie Franklin knocked down three 3-pointers for nine points, while freshmen Kellie Goodridge and Teal Carroll each contributed eight.

“I thought it was a really good college basketball game,” said Bates coach Jim Murphy. “That was a hell of a lot of points. Not a lot of defense was being played. We kept battling back and battling back. Come January, we’re going to have a pretty good team.”

Bates erupted to a 10-4 lead on the strength of four straight connections by Kostakis, who was 6-of-7 from the floor in the first half. Southern Maine scored eight unanswered points, fueled by Kent’s open 3-pointer and a traditional three-point play by Marble, to snag its first lead.

Twice, the Huskies went up by six. Twice, the Bobcats counter-punched to tie it. Sibley’s off-balance deuce with a minute to go and Nicole Paradis’ strong drive with 30 seconds left provided the margin of four, 44-40, at halftime.

Kostakis sat out the final 6:35 of the first half. For one brief juncture, Bates had four freshmen and the sophomore Beckwith on the floor.

With first-year guard Paradis and relatively untested forwards Kent and Samuelson combining for 23 points in the half, the Huskies had their own learning curve to navigate.

“I think we had plenty of inexperience on the court ourselves,” said USM coach Gary Fifield. “We’ve had to play without five of our top seven players from last year. We have two broken noses, an ACL, a stress fracture. This was a great test.”