By Glen Rosales
Special to the SUN

ALBUQUERQUE – Until the end of the third quarter, the game plan was working pretty well for Pojoaque Valley in the opening round of the boys state basketball tournament Saturday.

Three-pointers were dropping, the defense was forcing mistakes and the 14th seeded Elks held a nine-point lead over No. 3 Hope Christian.

Then for the closing three minutes of the third quarter, it all went awry as Pojoaque fell 84-75.

The Huskies scored seven points from the foul line in the middle of a 15-0 run to close the third quarter, which turned the game around and put Hope up 61-55.

“It was that two-minute spurt that really got us there at the end of the third quarter,” Elks coach Ryan Cordova said. “I only had two timeouts and I didn’t know if I wanted to burn one and leave myself with one in that fourth quarter. I really thought we could contain it.”

After Joziah Salazar hit a 3-pointer to open the fourth quarter and cut the lead to 61-58, Hope (22-8) went on another 8-0 run and the Elks (14-15) could get no closer than six points the rest of the way, despite Salazar, who finished with 20 points, hitting two more 3-pointers in the quarter.

It was Pojoaque’s outside shooting prowess that helped push the Elks into the lead. They hit seven 3-pointers in the first half, with six different players contributing from behind the arc. Pojoaque finished with a dozen 3s overall, with Salazar dropping four and Ezekial Atencio adding three. Even big man Serafin Mendez connected on a 3 as he finished with 17 points.

Pojoaque held a 40-36 halftime lead and twice built the lead to nine in the third quarter before things fell apart.

“I thought we had it, honestly,” guard Josh Gonzales, who finished with 12 points, said. “Just keep it slow and not turn over the ball. But we had a couple mistakes that were crucial.”

Still, the game plan was solid and for the most part, worked out well.

“We wanted to really put pressure on their guards so it makes it difficult to feed the posts, because we know that they wanted to get mismatches,” Cordova said. “We were also trying to switch on the top side so that we didn’t have their guards on the backside rebounding. They do a good job of getting you rotated and making you switch, and then you end up with a guard on the defensive rebound side. So we’re trying to switch on top and leave our bigs underneath the basket.”

For Mendez, it was tough to fend off the wave of tall and burly post players.

“It’s just kind of getting in the rhythm thing,” he said. “Just kind of finding the spurts to score, the spurts to play defense, just be in certain game situations.”

His teammates certainly noticed the strain he faced.

“I think they just got us on rebounds,” guard Josh Gonzales, who finished with 12 points, said. “They had more height than us. Really, we only have like one player over six foot. That’s what I was telling him. They were crashing on Serafin all the time.”

Hope plays in a small, cramped gym that can be a claustrophobic place to play, but Cordova had the team practicing at the middle school in preparation.

“Our old middle school gym looks a lot like Hope Christian and so we practiced there all week and we got confident in that setting,” Cordova said. “We got comfortable in that setting. We knew the floor is slippery. We knew it’s a short gym. We know that it’s just a different feel. And so we did that all week. And I think that’s why we came out so confident in that first half shooting. I think in the second half we still got good shots. We were missing by just a hair.”

And that was the story of the night for Hope.

“We had to rely on defense, and we did for, I mean, 30 of the 32 minutes,” Cordova said. “And that two minutes got us.”