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But they won, somehow.

‘‘We were really trying to limit Eryn and Taryn — we wanted to do the best we could do against them,” said Whitman coach Pete Kenah. ‘‘They got 26, but I thought if we could keep them in the 40s, we could score a little more than that. We bent but we didn’t break. Offense isn’t going to be there for you all the time, but we bent and didn’t break.”

Realistically, there were plenty of reasons for the Vikings’ crucial victory, which moved them to the top of the 4A East standings. First, they jumped off to an early lead. Early buckets by guard Julie McCabe, forward Erin Brown and center Laura Yockey kick-started a 10-0 run to open the game, giving Whitman a lead it never lost.

More importantly, the Vikings never lost composure, even when Springbrook came oh-so close to evening the score. With a minute to go in the third quarter, Christian scored two of her team-high 14 points on a transition lay-in to cut the lead to one, but McCabe immediately responded with a driving layup of her own just four seconds later. And after a Withers free throw put the Blue Devils back to within one with 4:50 remaining, Whitman guard Morgan Werner banged home an enormous three, followed by two-free throws and a lay-in by Brown.

A three-year starter, Brown leads the Vikings in scoring with just over 15 points a game. She dropped 17 on Springbrook Friday night, including several big baskets in the fourth quarter.

‘‘I just thought it was necessary for everyone to get more aggressive in the second half,” said Brown. ‘‘They have good players, Taryn and Erin — I mean, we had a good lead and they just broke it. I was trying to set a tone that we needed to not shut down once they got close.”

And they didn’t — though they received a scare. Facing a seemingly insurmountable seven-point deficit with under 20 seconds remaining, Christian and Withers hit long threes (Withers’s coming from nearly out-of-bounds) to cut it to two. After Whitman guard Zoe Walsh hit a free throw with 1.4 seconds left, Christian got a decent look at a 45-footer from just beyond center court, but caught the right side of the iron as the horn sounded.

‘‘Jeez, that last one by Withers, huh?” Kenah said. ‘‘How deep was that?”

‘‘They have players capable of making the plays and the shots, so it was nerve-racking,” said McCabe, who tallied 11 points to go along with six steals. ‘‘Our defense kept us in the game when our offense wasn’t exactly flourishing.”

Brown and McCabe, two three-year varsity players, were the driving forces behind the team’s second victory of the season over Springbrook. In their Dec. 21 meeting, Whitman won, 52-41.

It was a disappointing divisional loss for the Blue Devils, who had won its four previous games and had not lost in three weeks. They drop to third-place in the 4A East.

‘‘We had only nine points in the first half,” Springbrook coach Oliver Riggs said. ‘‘We had nine points in the first half against Churchill — we lost. You’re not going to win any game at any level, I don’t care whether it’s the pros or fourth-grade [level], scoring nine points in 16 minutes. If we converted even half the opportunities we had, we could have won.”