"C'mon, people!" he implored, motioning with his arms in a vain attempt to get anybody to rise.

He was wasting his breath. Perhaps a dozen people rose. The rest sat, too stunned by what they had been witnessing: their team being made to endure the very indignities they had foisted upon so many opposing teams over the past three seasons.

In their 56-35 Class 1A championship-game dismissal of the Spartans, tournament MVP Korina Baker and the rest of the Freeman Scotties applied the kind of stifling defense that had been a Granger trademark. And without the open 3-pointers Granger had rained down on its three previous tournament opponents, the Spartans did just what those opponents had done.

They imploded. They self-destructed.

"We got into their heads a little," said Freeman coach Ashlee Taylor, who was a senior standout on the last Freeman team to reach the championship game, in 2005. "It's a mental game, too, and I know how that goes. We've had those breakdowns, too. In the only game we lost this year, to Lakeside, we got behind and they got into our heads, and we started making mistakes."

The reason the Spartans (24-2) fell behind was simple: The Scotties (26-1) played nonstop, focused, hand-in-the-face defense.

"That's our whole thing: defense," said MacKenzie Taylor, Ashlee Taylor's younger sister, after her 13-point, five-rebound, three-assist performance. "Every practice, every huddle, every game, it's defense. Our shooting percentage is horrible -- on a good day, we shoot maybe 35 percent. So we have to focus on defense."

On Saturday, that defensive focus worked to perfection -- and to the Spartans' demise. Granger, which had been routing opponents with high-percentage shooting on open 3-pointers, simply didn't get any. The Spartans missed 14 of their 15 3-point attempts, and everything went downhill from there.

"We just tried to stop them from shooting from the outside, because that's all they had. They didn't do anything inside," Baker said. "We just kept pushing it and keeping up the intensity, instead of letting down."

The ones letting down, as it turned out, were the Spartans. Typically the smartest team on any court, they began making uncharacteristic mistakes. An inbounds pass where nobody comes to receive the pass, forcing a wasted time-out. Hurried 3-point shots taken out of rhythm, simply because for the first split-second in minutes, there wasn't a defender's hand in the way. Badly missed free throws. Cross-court passes so telegraphed that it wasn't a question of whether they would be intercepted, just which defender would do the honors.

"I really think when we missed our first few shots, we pressed," Granger coach Andy Affholter said. "I think we had more turnovers than points in the first half, and most of them were unforced."

The game is four parts mental and one part physical, and our four parts mental wasn't there tonight."

That's because the Scotties simply took away the physical, and the mental edge came with it. Freeman won it exactly the way Ashlee Taylor has been preaching to her girls all season -- with defense.

"Our girls, when they play defense and do it properly, they're scary," Ashlee Taylor said.

MacKenzie Taylor, the coach's younger sister, couldn't get over how focused the Scotties were.

"Our adrenaline was amazing," she said. "We haven't been to the finals, when Korina's and my older sisters (Melissa Baker and Ashlee Taylor) did it. They built this program, and we wanted to finish it off for them and make them proud."