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Mescalero Apache celebrates winning the Class 2A girls basketball championship Friday at Dreamstyle Arena – the Pit. (NMAA photo)

Copyright © 2020 Albuquerque Journal

Their screams echoed off the concrete bleacher seating of the 15,411-seat arena.

A painful stroke of irony forced the Mescalero Apache girls basketball team to hoist that community’s first-ever state team championship without a single fan allowed in Dreamstyle Arena for Friday’s Class 2A title game.

But as the team’s own screams intensified in a smothering game-defining third-quarter run en route to a 69-54 win for the No. 2 seeded Chiefs over No. 1 Peñasco, there was no mistaking the team felt behind them the energy of their parents, friends and family waiting 37 feet above court level in the parking lot of the Pit – with TV monitors and smart phones living and dying with every shot.

“We’re just so close,” said Mescalero Apache senior star Fallon Velasquez, the 2019 Class 2A Player of the Year. “And then the first round of state, we had one of our players get hurt. Then we come here (to Albuquerque), and our fans are a big part of our team. To get here and then have them taken away from us, it was tough. But we all became so much closer together this week.”

After trailing most of the first half to Peñasco (30-3), Velasquez and the Chiefs (28-3) erupted in the third quarter. Trailing 31-24 early in the 3rd quarter, Velasquez took over, scoring her team’s next 11 points, including two 3-pointers and a 3-point play, to take a 35-33 lead with 5:47 left in the quarter.

Peñasco star Carly Gonzales, who has scored at least 2,500 points in a five-year high school career (the school lost her eighth-grade season scoring stats, so it is an estimated total), hit a pair of free throws with 5:29 left, knotting the hotly contested, to that point, game at 35.

From that point on, one team seemed to hit the wall and another seemed destined to be carried into the history books.

Mescalero rattled off a 13-0 run, including hitting three consecutive 3-pointers, and led 48-35 with 39 seconds left in the quarter, never looking back.

“We kept everybody fresh the first half, and they play three girls that don’t come out of the game at all,” said Mescalero Apache coach Elmer Chavez, the one-time NMSU assistant and interim head coach and 2014 4A title winner at Santa Fe High School.

“I knew if we stayed fresh … we kept resting these girls, then we started attacking and the second half, once we started going you couldn’t stop it.”

Velasquez capped her stellar career with a 32-point, 10-rebound, six assist stat line that included 12-of-13 at the free throw line, and she hit four of her team’s eight 3-pointers.

Peñasco was led by Gonzales’ 18 points and 14 rebounds and got 14 points from Adrianna Tafoya, who scored 1,700 career points. But the Panthers simply couldn’t stop the second half momentum of the Chiefs.

“The third quarter,” Peñasco coach Mandy Montoya said, “That’s where I think we got away from what we do. And I think Velasquez did a great job of putting the team on her back and being super aggressive. …

“But I told them, they were the best team all year. They have a lot to be proud of.”