Marina Mabrey scores 53 to tie the WNBA record in Toronto's 125-94 win against the Sparks

Marina Mabrey looked for her sister first.

Michaela Mabrey was already coming, running out from the stands the moment the horn sounded, and the two wrapped each other up at center court while the Coca-Cola Coliseum crowd stayed on its feet. Michaela does not get to see her play in person often. That was part of why Marina kept getting emotional about the night afterward.

She had just scored 53 points.

Mabrey tied the WNBA single-game scoring record on Thursday in the Toronto Tempo's 125-94 win over the Los Angeles Sparks, joining A'ja Wilson and Liz Cambage as the only players to reach 53 in league history. She got there on 17-of-28 shooting and 9-of-18 from 3. By the closing minutes the game had become a group effort, with the Tempo running their offense through Mabrey on nearly every possession to see how high the number could climb.

"None of this happens without my teammates. They really found me," Mabrey said. "For a three-point shooter, you need your teammates to set screens and deliver the pass, and that's what they did."

She had 27 by halftime and 39 by the end of the third quarter. Toronto led by enough that the only thing left to chase was the record. Mabrey kept shooting 3s and kept making them. Her final two attempts missed, and she checked out with just over a minute to play to a standing ovation, the record tied rather than broken.

The team total was historic on its own. Toronto's 125 points are the most any team has scored in a regulation WNBA game. In 2010, Phoenix scored 127 points in double overtime.

An expansion team that keeps doing this

What stands out is who produced the night. The Tempo are in their first season, a roster assembled in an expansion draft and put together in a hurry, the kind of team that is supposed to spend at least one year losing and learning names. Instead they keep turning the Sparks into the backdrop for franchise milestones. Brittney Sykes scored a career-high 38 against Los Angeles in May. Mabrey set the Tempo's single-game record with 37 just last week, then broke her own mark Thursday.

Mabrey is not a player the league has built offenses around. She has spent her career as a shooter teams were willing to move, valued more for spacing than for carrying a unit. In Toronto she has been given a larger role, and on Thursday she turned it into the most points the WNBA has seen in 40 minutes.

The win continues a start that has not looked like a typical expansion season. For a franchise still introducing itself to its city, a 53-point performance in front of a home crowd that stood and roared does a lot of that work at once.

For Mabrey, the result mattered less than the people in the building for it. Her sister had made the trip. The crowd had given her an ovation. The record she now shares with two of the most dominant scorers the league has produced came on a night her family was in the room, and that, she said afterward, was the part that stayed with her.