UNCASVILLE, Conn. — Indiana head coach Christie Sides pauses every time she sees the chart of the top four ranked players and their active rosters and playoff experiences.

Near the top are the third-seeded Connecticut Sun, the team she schedules. Their 222 combined postseason games are the second-most, behind the two-time reigning champion Las Vegas Aces. The least experienced of the top four are the Minnesota Lynx with 130 and who are led by a four-time WNBA champion head coach.

In small letters at the bottom it says Fever: 19 games.

“I didn’t even know we had 19,” Fever general manager Lin Dunn said before the team practiced for Game 2 on Tuesday at Mohegan Sun Arena.

The Fever are the least experienced playoff team on the field, and it showed in their Game 1 loss. They were undisciplined and panicked at key moments, turning a two-possession deficit into a blowout. Connecticut was more physical, sharper, and stuck to the game plan.

“We had a veteran team in their home stadium that had a ton of playoff experience, and we didn’t,” Dunn said. “And now we have some (experience) and let’s see how we respond to that. You can’t tell what it’s like. You just have to experience it.”

Sides and her coaching staff will make their changes — improving their physicality, beefing up their transition defense — but they can’t make up for that experience gap overnight. That’s why the second-year head coach is making sure to savor the moment and keep perspective as she continues to fight to force a Game 3 inside Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on Friday night.

“These guys, they’re figuring it out, and this is going to be great for the future, to get this experience,” Sides said Tuesday before practice. Before Game 1, she didn’t hesitate to say she’d be talking about championships in three to five years, as she first said last summer.

Four of the five Fever starters have less than three years of WNBA experience. They all made deep March Madness runs in college, but entered the first-round series with zero combined games of WNBA playoff experience. That includes seven-year veteran guard Kelsey Mitchell.

Caitlin Clark, who just played in back-to-back Final Fours, said Tuesday that the intensity, pressure and win-or-go-home situation are similar to college but still different for a rookie at the pro level.

“It’s a learning curve for me too,” Clark said. “This is obviously my first playoff. This is this team’s first playoff for a lot of people. We’re all going through it at the same time and learning from it. You don’t always know what to expect because a lot of us have never been here before.”

Every other team has at least one veteran — and usually several — who has reached the Finals or won a championship. DeWanna Bonner, who first guarded Clark in Game 1, won two titles in Phoenix. The Mercury won it all in her rookie year in 2009, but she came off the bench. Bonner, 37, will play her 82nd playoff game on Wednesday in her 62nd playoff start. Alyssa Thomas will play her 42nd playoff game, Brionna Jones her 32nd and DiJonai Carrington her 22nd.

“(It’s about) knowing what to expect from the environment (and) understanding that the margin for error is much smaller,” Sun head coach Stephanie White said before coaching her 20th playoff game, including 11 during the Fever’s run to the finals in 2015.

Thomas said she remembers going into her first playoff in 2017 as part of a young, confident Sun group when it was still a single-elimination. She didn’t necessarily understand what it took to be ready to play and weather the ups and downs of a playoff environment. No one can explain it, she said. It’s a higher level of competition that you have to endure to understand. The more experienced Mercury knocked them out two years in a row, despite the Sun being the higher seed.

“We hadn’t been there and they had,” Thomas said. “You could see that, but we also remembered that feeling and kept building it.”

Dunn’s three-year plan for the Fever ended with “making the playoffs,” and they did it with a vengeance. The Fever clinched the No. 6 seed weeks before the end of the season to reach their first postseason since 2016 in a league that welcomes 75 percent of its teams to the party. The head coach of the Fever’s 2012 championship team didn’t offer a timetable for the next step from a championship, but did indicate the team would be active in free agency again to help fill some of the gap.

“(The Sun) showed their championship experience, and that rubs off on your teammates. It’s infectious,” Dunn said. “And so we have to, we have to go down that path where we have more people with that kind of experience.”

They can only go with who they have now. The Fever remain in a deep playoff experience deficit, but that number now goes from 19 to 31 games.

“We can kind of learn from that,” Lexie Hull said. “That every possession means something, and the five of us on the court just have to be focused and compete and dive for those loose balls. It just means so much, especially tomorrow (in Game 2).”