MINNEAPOLIS — Alana Beard made the game-winning shot in Game 1 of the WNBA Finals at 4:07 PM CT, celebrated with her teammates at the bottom of a dog pile, made the media rounds, read all of the texts from friends, spoke with her mom, dad and sister on the phone, ate dinner, then returned to her hotel room Sunday evening.

“Nothing unusual,” she said of her routine after the shot of her life.

After 11 years in the WNBA — plus two lost due to injury — Beard has “trained [her] mind to just stay in the moment,” the 34-year-old said before the L.A. Sparks returned to the Target Center floor for practice on Monday. The Minnesota Lynx, on the wrong end of the historic shot, expressed hope that they could do the same.

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While the Sparks franchise enjoyed a moment in the sun — the buzzer-beater earned the No. 1 spot on SportsCenter’s Top 10 Plays — the Lynx retreated to the locker room dejected but calmly confident. “Coach [Cheryl Reeve] is very relaxed,” said center Sylvia Fowles. “I think any coach who would’ve been in that position would’ve flipped. … But she knows what it takes. She said everyone yesterday was moving at a slow rate and that’s untypical for us.”

Lynx guard Seimone Augustus said the players reconvened before leaving the arena on Sunday and talked about their response for Tuesday’s Game 2 back at the Target Center. “Nothing too aggressive,” Augustus said. “We just said what we needed to do. And we knew. We kneeeew when we got in there what we needed to clean up.”

Augustus re-watched the full game at home later that night, just as she does after every game. When the replay ended, she shut her phone off. “I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I tried to get the best night’s sleep and focus on Tuesday,” she explained.

“You can’t hang on to what happened. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. It’s over, it’s done. Focus on Game 2.”

About 21 hours after she sagged just a little too far off of Beard and saw the game-winner sail over her outstretched fingertips, Maya Moore welcomed a few dozen children to the Target Center for a Jr. NBA Clinic. The next hour was therapeutic.

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“I think its kind of interesting timing, having a clinic, but it actually works out pretty well,” said Moore, who called Beard’s shot “heartbreaking.”

“We get a chance to remember why we love the game so much, where we come from, how we started at their age and loving the game. I think it does just as much for us as it does for the kids.”

Augustus said the clinic brought her back to the days she would run the same drills with her dad — in their yard with makeshift equipment rather than in a professional basketball arena. She called the afternoon activity a chance to hit the “refresh button,” a return to “ground level.”

But the Lynx, who did not practice on Monday, knew the pain that was coming next: film study. “That might be worse actually than the practice court,” Augustus said with a smile. “‘Cause then you can hit the rewind button and play it again. Then rewind it and play it again.

“It’s something that we need,” she added. “We need to actually put an eye on it.”

“You can’t hang on to what happened. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. It’s over, it’s done. Focus on Game 2.” — Seimone Augustus

Even before they gathered in the film room, the Lynx knew what they were going to see. Fifteen turnovers. Zero-for-four shooting from beyond the arc. Backdoor cuts that went undefended. Mainly, a game that could have turned long before Beard’s jump shot brought the final score to Sparks 78, Lynx 76.

“It’s a whole lot that leads up to it,” Fowles said. “From the outside looking in, it’s the game-winning shot. But for us, it’s the bigger picture.”

Thankfully for the Lynx, it’s easier for a team that has played in five WNBA Finals in the past six years to understand the bigger picture. A year ago, they found themselves in a similar place after the Indiana Fever came to town and stole Game 1. Minnesota, of course, rallied to win its third title — due in large part to Moore’s own crowd-silencing buzzer-beater on the road in Game 3.

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“It’s happened to us before. I’ve been in a lot of Finals. There are going to be ups and downs,” said point guard Lindsay Whalen. “There are a lot of minutes left. It’s going to be back and forth tomorrow. As you saw last night, there were a lot of momentum swings. They had the last swing of momentum. Our job [Tuesday] night is to be ourselves. We need to come out better [Tuesday] night.”

Taking care of the ball will be Reeve’s point of emphasis heading into Game 2. L.A.’s 18-4 advantage in points off turnovers was a difference-maker in a game that featured 10 lead changes and 19 ties. Moore and Augustus said the Lynx took some time to adjust to the Sparks’ length. “There wasn’t one time that Maya, myself or Sylvia weren’t swarmed when we had the ball,” Augustus said.

But equally if not more important is the mental game, and the Lynx are well-tested on that front, as well. They talked Monday of how a loss like that can only add “fuel to the fire,” combined with the calmness of having been here before. Asked about the effect of a defeat at the buzzer, Augustus mimicked an EKG machine delivering a shock to her chest.

“It’ll wake you up,” she said. “It’s the Finals. They came in to win and that’s what they did yesterday. So now it’s time to put the pedal to the metal, it’s time to get up and do what we need to do. You can’t come in flat and not have energy or passion or whatever it was that we were lacking in Game 1. Game 2 and all the way to Game 5 if it makes it to five games, you need not say that we were outworked or we didn’t bring it. We need to bring it. And if we did and we still lose, then we can live with that.”