The McMaster Marauders stamped their women’s rugby campaign with an exclamation mark Sunday, an emphatic 27-3 thumping of the Queen’s Gaels in the 2015 Canadian Interuniversity Sport final in Kingston.

“This has been an incredible story,” said McMaster head coach Shaun Allen. “We’ve been on a terrific two-year run and it’s nice to finish up this way.”

The Marauders were full marks for the triumph, tallying 27 unanswered points and fashioning stifling defence, particularly in the opening half when the Gaels enjoyed the benefit of a steady, stiff wind that blew from the north throughout the match.

“Queen’s played a good territory game in the first half but we responded with strong defensive play,” Allen said. “Then once we had the wind in our favour, we gained the confidence to play a more open game, our game.”

Showcasing that style of play was all-Canadian eight-man Cindy Nelles, later named MVP of the eight-team tournament. The national-team player tallied two tries and exploded on several long runs, dashing here, darting there, straight-arming defenders out of her path. She was arguably the best player on the pitch Sunday.

Prop Colleen Irowa, with a pair, and fly-half Steph Black also scored tries en route to McMaster’s first CIS crown.

Queen’s co-captain Lauren McEwen, in her collegiate swansong, kicked a penalty eight minutes into the match to give the home side a brief 3-0 lead.

In the bronze-medal match, the Ottawa Gee-Gees clobbered Concordia 65-7.

Hours prior to the start of the Sunday’s matinee for all the marbles, Queen’s coach Beth Barz predicted, based on past battles between the two foes, a close affair. Her Gaels had handed the Marauders their lone defeat this year, a one-point decision in the season curtain-raiser in Kingston. In the 2014 campaign, McMaster trimmed Queen’s by the same margin. Ditto the year before that when Queen’s narrowly prevailed.

And indeed Sunday’s match was close for the majority of the first half at windswept Nixon Field, where a capacity crowd of about 500, including a vocal contingent from Hamilton, filled the string of aluminum bleachers along one sideline and stood three and four deep behind the dead-ball line at each end.

“We gassed ourselves on that long goal-line stand at the end of the first half,” Barz said in the wake of Sunday’s final, explaining what went wrong during a second half in which the host club was outscored — 20-0 — and outplayed.

“Those two quick tries McMaster scored early in the second half really gave them momentum,” Barz said, referring to two rapid-fire tries, three minutes apart, that Mac put on the scoreboard before the five-minute mark.

“But they were unconverted tries, so we were still in it,” she added. “But it’s awfully difficult to keep coming back, which we’d done twice already in the tournament.”

En route to its first appearance in a women’s national final, the host school, the eighth seed, knocked off top-ranked Acadia and came back to defeat Concordia in Saturday’s semifinal. One more come-from-behind triumph was not in the cards for the Tricolour.

After McEwen’s 25-metre penalty kick snapped a scoreless game, McMaster responded six minutes later with the first of Irowa’s two tries. Black’s convert put the visitors up 7-3, and only that long, withering goal-line stand Barz alluded to kept the Gaels four points back at the break.

Still, the silver medal is something a young Queen’s team — nine first-year players among Sunday’s 25-member lineup — can build upon. The experience alone may well pay dividends down the line.

“It’s a bright future,” said Barz, who also says goodbye to a half-dozen graduates. “With so many good young players, we’ll definitely springboard off that.”

patrick.kennedy@sunmedia.ca