“We battled back after the first one, they went for a little bit of a run,” Sleepy Eye head coach Grant Romberg said. “But we didn’t shoot the ball as well as normal. That’s one thing, BOLD shot the ball very well, and some of that comes from experience. They’ve been in this situation a lot, almost every year over the past however many years. You could tell we were playing a little tight the first half. We were not taking some shots that we normally would have taken, and I’m sure a lot of that was nerves, and that comes with experience. Besides [Paige] Haala and [Cadence] Okerman, none of them have been here before.

“The second half we picked up on some pressure a little bit, and that helped us. We frustrated BOLD for a while, slowed them down. But in the end we just couldn’t get our rhythm and our shots weren’t falling.

Okerman led Sleepy Eye with 16 points, while Haala and Sam Price each had 9 points. Jaelyn Schauman added 6 points for the Indians.

The teams traded buckets early, and after a 4-4 tie, Sleepy Eye took a 8-4 lead after a pair of steals leading to layups by Okerman and Taylor Berkner. The Indians maintained a narrow lead until BOLD’s Zoey Lippert hit a 3-pointer to put the Warriors up 15-13. BOLD extended that lead to 20-15, then went on a 10-0 run to go up 30-15. Sleepy Eye ended the run with a 3-pointer from Haala. Jace Schauman got a steal and a layup to cut the lead to 35-24 before halftime.

Staff photo by Ari Selvey Sleepy Eye’s Cadence Okerman pulls up for a shot during the Section 2A Girls Basketball Semifinals against BOLD Monday at Gustavus Adolphus College.

Layups from Price and Okerman got the lead down to 37-28 after the break, but Lippert hit another 3-pointer to keep the lead in double-digits. A free throw from Jaelynn Schauman put the score at 47-33, but the Warriors went on a 11-2 run, interrupted only by a pair of free throws from Okerman, to force a timeout from Sleepy Eye as BOLD went up 58-35 with 5:56 to play. The scoring slowed down from there, and while Okerman scored on a layup and Haala made a mid-range jumper, BOLD’s reserves entered the game with two minutes to go to play out the remainder of the game.

Sleepy Eye ends its season with a 21-8 record, including a 12-game win streak to close the season.

“We had a really strong season and better than probably a lot of people thought we were going to have,” Romberg said. “It was a big task to replace [Kadence] Hesse and [Brea] Mertz from last year. They were phenomenal scorers. But the girls, after we figured some things out and they got acclimated in their roles, we played really solid. I thought we had an excellent year. Just got beat by the better team today.”