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The Urbana High boys basketball team did their best to stop a potent offensive opponent in Thursday's Maryland Public Secondary School Athletic Association's Class 4A semifinal.

And while the Hawks (21-3) were able to overcome a slow start, it wasn't enough to contain the Old Mill offense, and the Anne Arundel County squad scrapped its way to a 73-64 win at the Comcast Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. On Saturday, the winners will face Springbrook for the state championship. The Montgomery County juggernaut slipped by Eleanor Roosevelt in the earlier semifinal, 52-48.

The last time the Patriots (21-3) failed to score at least 70 points was on Jan. 15, in a 61-51 win over North County. Urbana's defense held Old Mill to their third-lowest total in 13 games.

Both teams were peculiarly slow in getting their high-octane offenses off the ground. Only with a last-minute scoring flurry in the first quarter was Old Mill able to go up 15-10.

The Patriots' game plan was to control the tempo by taking an early lead, then see if Urbana could run with them. First, Old Mill was up 23-13, only to see the Hawks go on a 7-0 run that also got Patriots' junior James Williams into early foul trouble. But Old Mill was more methodical with the last three minutes of the second half, engineering a 9-2 burst and a 32-22 halftime lead.

Both teams had first-half power outages from major contributors. Senior Chris Day, Old Mill's all-time leader in 3-pointers and games played, had only one point at the close of the second quarter. Itching to fix this matter, he drilled a 3-pointer 16 seconds into the third quarter. By game's end, he finished with 12 points. Day's big 3-pointer spurred on the Patriots' last big run, a 12-2 effort that gave Old Mill an insurmountable 44-24 lead.

Urbana head coach Terry Connelly had spent the entire halftime getting his key contributors back into the Hawks' mindset.

"I was saying at halftime, ‘There's no 8- or 9-point shot.' We needed to chip away at it slowly," Connolly said. "I didn't know they were going to come out and hit those 3-pointers. It made our task a little more daunting, but it also made it more incredible."

Urbana senior Kevin Sowers, averaging 19.5 points per game coming into the semifinal, had just five points at the end of the first half. He then exploded for 13 in the third quarter en route to a 26-point performance. "It sucks that you can't play the whole game like that," Sowers said.

Junior Jude Merkel, one of the late-season improvements to the Hawks' offense, only had five points in the first 16 minutes of play. With just under six minutes left to play, Merkel helped start a 14-0 run for Urbana, and finished with 20 points to go with a game-high 11 rebounds. Senior Frankie Jarboe added 11 for the Hawks.

"If you asked a lot of people this time last year if we were going to be any good, a lot of people wouldn't have thought much of us," Jarboe said.