And then he had the rest of the players give them a standing ovation.

It was an improbable way to end a night of unexpected happenings as Damrow and Chan stepped up and played crucial roles in the No. 6 Badgers’ four-set victory over UCLA 20-25, 25-15, 25-22, 25-15 at Pauley Pavilion.

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Damrow, a redshirt freshman, and Chan, a freshman, were called upon to step into the lineup. Chan filled in at defensive specialist for Gulce Guctekin, who sat out with an apparent back problem, and Damrow took over at libero after Lola Schumacher was hit in the face by a ball during warmups and watched from the bench wearing dark glasses.

It was the biggest roles either of them had been given, and to be singled out for their contributions was truly special.

“It makes me emotional because I feel like outside of practice nobody gets to see how hard we work,” Damrow said. “Obviously, our team appreciates how hard we work but people outside don’t get to see that. So I feel like going out on the court and showing that we are good volleyball players and can contribute to this team and our teammates recognize that and Kelly recognizing that is a very special feeling. That’s something I’ll hold onto for a very long time.”

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Not that the match was without its bumpy moments for each of them. As the new person in the serve receive pattern, Damrow was targeted 31 times by UCLA servers. She got aced twice in the first set loss and one more time early in the second set. But after that she handled most every challenge and finished with strong passing numbers. She also recorded a match-high 15 digs.

“We’ve got trust in her,” Sheffield said. “She came in and did her job and did it really well and made some really nice plays. They put a lot of serves on her and I thought she did a really good job keeping us in system. She passed about 2.4, 2.5, which is a really nice number. There were some errors, some hesitation stuff early and then she played hard and did a good job.”

Chan’s issues came at the service line where she had five errors in 13 attempts, but she provided some strong defensive play and finished with six digs in her first extended playing opportunity.

“There’s an aspect that we’re on the bench for most of the games, but we contribute in practice and help the team get better that way,” Chan said. “But being able to be on the court with those (five) other girls and directly contribute to a win is just a feeling like no other. It feels good.”

And to have that singled out on the bus and be applauded by their teammates?

“It was a good feeling,” Chan said. “It’s cool knowing your teammates have your back. It was my first time stepping into that role and they made it real easy to transition into that and be able to go out and have fun and play.”

Sheffield was pleased with how the Badgers (20-5, 14-2 Big Ten) responded to having some last-minute alterations to the lineup. Even if it took a while to get past some bumpy moments.

“We had some curveballs thrown at us and I thought we responded to it really well,” Sheffield said. “I thought we got outplayed in the first set and then we were more disciplined and played harder defensively. We talked about, ‘Hey, you got punched in the nose, which was more than that fight that we saw on Netflix (Friday) night.’ But we got an opportunity to respond and I thought we did a really nice job of responding.”

Here are three things that stood out in the match.

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After struggling with service errors early in the season, the Badgers had pretty much corrected that. At least until Saturday night when they committed 17 service errors, matching their season high from the first match of the season at Louisville. It was one more error than they had in the four previous matches combined.

Nearly half of their errors came in the third set, when they missed on eight serves to help the Bruins keep things close. But they did succeed in limiting the damage by siding out after six of the eight errors.

“It’s a little bit more than what we want and it’s not something we see very often,” Sheffield said. “But it doesn’t kill you if you keep siding out. Clearly, we had some servers for a while there that were having trouble getting that feel and finding it.

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“You can either get overwhelmed by frustration, or you can just get back to work each time. It doesn’t matter how many service errors you have, if they don’t score two in a row they can’t win. And we just kept siding out and siding out. How do you respond when you’re not feeling things or if part of you game isn’t doing well? How are you doing in the other parts? We kept the rest of our game high, even though we were having trouble in some of our rotations keeping the ball in play.”

The Badgers have the most efficient attack in the Big Ten by far, hitting .323 in conference matches, well ahead of Nebraska’s .284 mark in second place.

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But in the first set they were a little out of sync, hitting just .265. But they got better in each set after that, hitting .412 in the second, .450 in the third and .472 in the fourth to finish with a .402 mark for the match.

“It was big time,” Sheffield said. “We put up a really nice offensive match against them and we got better defensively as well.”

After allowing the Bruins (12-13, 6-10) to hit .433 in the first set, the Badgers held them to a .120 clip the rest of the match.

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Wisconsin’s one-two punch of Sarah Franklin on the left and Anna Smrek on the right did most of the damage to UCLA. Franklin had 19 kills with just two errors, hitting .378, and Smrek had 16 kills and two errors, hitting .609. Smrek had six kills in the pivotal third set, three of them coming in the Badgers’ final six points.

And just to keep things in balance, Julia Orzol contributed 11 kills without an error, hitting .423.

Outside hitter Cheridyn Leverette was the big offensive force for the Bruins with 20 kills, hitting .368.