Werner Christen shrugged his shoulders in disbelief.
The Douglas High girls' basketball coach had just watched his team play its best eight minutes of basketball of the entire season.
They'd avoided the slow start that had plagued them all year. They'd held a talented McQueen squad scoreless for a long stretch of the first half.
The offense came together, they were scoring in transition and they rattled off 19 unanswered points.
And at the end of it all, somehow, the Tigers were on the losing end of a 39-36 contest.
"I don't even know what to say," Christen said with a laugh. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
Douglas opened up a 27-8 lead in the first half and held McQueen without a field goal for nearly 11 minutes.
The Lancers, though, turned the tables completely on Douglas, outscoring the Tigers 28-9 in the second half.
"It's a position (holding a substantial lead) that this team is not used to playing in," Christen said. "We played too careful. We were playing not to lose and we stopped doing a lot of things that we had been doing well in the first half."
Even after the second half collapse, the Tigers still had a chance win, even building a five-point lead on a 4-0 run with three minutes left, but the Lancers scored the game's final eight points to claim the win.
"You have to give some credit to McQueen, they were aggressive on defense and we struggled to get through that," Christen said. "I didn't like our tempo at the end of the first half. We warned them at halftime that if we continued to play like that, we could get in trouble.
"We didn't finish and we didn't hit some of those easy shots down the stretch."
It was a far cry from the first quarter.
"That was the best quarter we've played all season," Christen said.
Ebony Cleveland led the Tigers with nine points, Carly McCullough had seven and Erica Macias had six.
