The Seattle Storm are one win in their best-of-five series with the Phoenix Mercury from advancing to the WNBA Finals for the first time since 2010.

That one win will be difficult. Seattle must play the Phoenix Mercury on the road in Game 3 of the WNBA semifinals on Friday night and the Mercury, down 2-0 in the series, will not be eliminated easily.

Standing in the way of the Storm, the team with the best overall record (26-8) during the WNBA regular season, are veterans Diana Taurasi, Brittney Griner and DeWanna Bonner.

Taurasi, in particular, is the one the Storm are concerned about after she led the fifth-seeded Mercury (who finished 20-14 in the regular season) to a dramatic fourth-quarter comeback in Game 2 on Tuesday before losing 91-87 in overtime at Seattle.

Taurasi outscored Seattle 14-12 in the quarter and made a 3-pointer with 3.6 seconds left to cap a Mercury comeback from 19 points down.

“It’s the playoffs and if you’re going to win a championship you got to go through the best and Diana is the best,” said Seattle guard Sue Bird, a former teammate of Taurasi’s at Connecticut. “In some ways, it’s almost impossible to stop. In other ways, as an opponent, you’re just constantly trying to think of ways to stop it. But once she gets into that zone, it’s really difficult.

“For us to be able to weather these two games — of course we’re upset we lost the lead — but we weathered and we were able to still get the win against a great player and a really solid team. We feel very fortunate to be sitting here up 2-0 and we know it’s not going to be easy in Phoenix.”

Bird, who finished with 19 points and six assists on Tuesday, made the go-ahead layup in overtime with 1:09 left and the Storm’s defense took over from there after collapsing against Taurasi and the Mercury in the fourth quarter.

In both wins so far over Phoenix, Seattle has built a double-digit lead in the fourth only for the Mercury to surge back with a furious rally.

“We made a couple shots here, caused some turnovers there,” said Taurasi, who made all four of her shots in the fourth quarter, including three 3-pointers, in Game 2. “They missed some shots. We were able to get into some sort of rhythm that I don’t think we’ve been able to get to in this series so far.

“It was a slew of things, and we kept cutting the lead little by little. That shows a lot of fight from our team.”

An example of Seattle’s late-game breakdowns against Phoenix: WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart scored just two of her team-high 27 points in the fourth quarter of Game 2.

“You get the lead, you probably relax a little bit, and then all of a sudden they start to get it going,” Seattle coach Dan Hughes said. “You could see it. This shot goes in. This shot goes in, then this shot goes in, so they get momentum and all of a sudden the momentum has changed.

“I think it’s a growing process for us. Every game we are trying to learn something.”

Griner, a five-time WNBA All-Star, scored 23 points on 11-of-19 shooting and collected 10 rebounds in nearly 35 minutes before fouling out with 4:01 left in overtime. Her exit frustrated Phoenix, which once again realized it must have better starts to have a good chance to upset the Storm in the end.

“Very, very disappointed,” Mercury coach Sandy Brondello said. “We dug ourselves a big hole again. We were very resilient getting back into the game and finally made some 3-point shots. It took us until the last 20 seconds at the end to make them, but it’s a game that we should’ve won.”