For better than 21/2 quarters of their first state-tournament semifinal, the Colton Wildcats were flat. Then sophomore Kelsey Moser went flat.

And everything changed.

Moser dove face-first at midcourt, scrapping for the ball she had just stripped from a Touchet player. The ball squirted free from them, and Alisa Moehrle-Druffel grabbed it and raced to the other end for a layup. A few seconds later, Moehrle-Druffel intercepted an errant Touchet pass and raced in for another layup.

And the rout was on. Those two baskets triggered 13 straight Colton points and what had been a tight, three-point game turned into a 43-26 Wildcat romp. That moved into tonight's 9 p.m. championship game against Garfield-Palouse, a 57-53 winner over Sunnyside Christian in Friday's late semifinal.

"They're pretty big and physical," Vining said of Gar-Pal, which took two of three from his Wildcats this season, one of them a 59-38 throttling. "To beat them, you've got to be aggressive, you've got to match their intensity — you can't back down from them."

But don't expect a high-scoring game.

"They're a defensive team," Vining said of the Vikings. "That's what they've built their program on. It's going to be a slow-down, tractor-pull kind of a game. It could be 34-31. That's their game, and they're very good at it."

Colton's game, meanwhile, has for the last two years been explosive offense, with Vining giving his shooters free rein to fire away from beyond the 3-point line whenever they're open. On Friday, though, after a run of three first-quarter treys, the long shots stopped falling.

In fact, everything did. The Wildcats shot an abysmal 4-for-24 in the first half, but Touchet wasn't much better at 5-for-28, and midway through the third period, there was Colton clinging to a 26-23 lead.

Then came the run.

"Maybe we just needed to wake up," Moser said. "It's a really long week. It's the first time we played three games in a row. We were shooting the same shots — they just started falling. The averages are going to even out sometime."

The one whose shots began falling in abundance was Moehrle-Druffel, a 19.0-point scorer whose first half included 0-for-6 shooting from the field and two total points.

"It was a little frustrating, but if I'm not shooting (well), I'll pass it to players who are hot," said Moehrle-Druffel, who got hot herself, beginning with those back-to-back layups. She hit a 3-pointer to close the third quarter and scored 11 points over the game's final 11 minutes.

"Defense gets our momentum going," said Moehrle-Druffel, a sentiment Vining echoed.

"I thought our defense was the key tonight," he said. "Holding a good team like Touchet to 26 points, that's just unbelievable."

Doing that to Garfield-Palouse might be more difficult, considering the Vikings' solid offensive performance against Sunnyside Christian on Friday night.

And the Vikings are well-acquainted with Colton.

"Since third grade, Colton and us have been sparring back and forth," Gar-Pal senior Katie Redman said. "There's some history there."

"We all know each other, because we've been playing each other so long," added Vikings senior Bridget Bower. "I think both teams match up well. It should be fun."

Gar-Pal coach Steve Swinney hopes so, anyway.

"They like to put it up," he said of the Wildcats. "We'll have to be a little quicker on defense than we were tonight. If Moehrle and (Ashley) Nygreen get hot, it could be a rough night."