Five hours before the start of the game, the Mesa Vista basketball team ate lunch at Olive Garden in Santa Fe.
During the course of the lunch, coach Jesse Boies went up to every player on the team, and asked how they were feeling, and if they were nervous.
Not a single one said she was. Even their newly-called-up eighth-grader, Isabella Gallegos, was calm.
“Am I actually going to get minutes today?” Gallegos responded to Boies. She did.
Gallegos played the final minutes after Mesa Vista had gone up by nearly 40 points. The top-seeded Lady Trojans (26-3) cruised to a 74-36 victory over No. 8 Laguna-Acoma (18-10) in the state quarterfinals on Tuesday in Rio Rancho. The Lady Trojans will face No. 4 Tularosa on Thursday.
Hanging over the team was the memory of an upset loss from a year ago, 48-38 against Texico, where the Lady Trojans were cold the whole game. They reached that point mark by the second quarter.
“There wasn’t even no nerves today,” Shanae Silva said. “I was just excited. I just wanted to get on that court and play.”
Tana Lopez led the Trojans with 23 points. Silva added 22 on incredibly efficient 8-for-9 shooting. Bella Boies continued her role as the distributor with 10 points, seven assists and five steals. And Brittni Suazo led the team with 10 rebounds while adding nine points.
Silva still remembers her two missed free throws with nine seconds to go against Pecos back in January, which led to overtime and a loss, the last time Mesa Vista has lost. Since then, she shoots 100 free throws during or after every practice.
“I could have won the game for us, and I missed both,” she said.
Mesa Vista forced 27 turnovers, and shot 55 percent from the floor in the game, many coming on easy transition layups. Compare that to their previous quarterfinal, where they were at 22 percent.
“We work on fastbreak layups at practice all the time,” Lopez said. “They carry on to the game.”
And it was all Mesa Vista right from the start. After winning the tipoff, they scored first, forced a timeout within the first two minutes, and in not too long were up 19-2 and put in the second string.
“Our gameplan was, we were going to come in, and we’re going to finish this game before it even starts,” Jesse Boies said.
By halftime, the Trojans led 43-21. And that lead only continued to grow through the second half, with some of the fourth quarter played with a running clock.
“We have an inside joke in the huddle,” Boies said. “If I can feel a team coming close, I’ll kind of go like this (puts closed hands together). And this one over here (Lopez) will be like, ‘Coach, let’s break them.’ They feel when a team is just on the verge of collapsing.”
Boies said for this game, it was in the third quarter. Dulce rattled off a 14-2 run to start the second half.
Tularosa, Mesa Vista’s next opponent, advanced to the semifinals after nearly giving away a 12-point lead in the closing minutes. But Menaul’s furious comeback came up just short when they turned the ball over down by one point.
The two teams have not faced each other since at least 2007, as far back as MaxPreps records go.
“These girls, they’re battle tested,” Boies said of the Lady Trojans. “They know how to win. They have that champion mentality.”