That the East Valley Red Devils upended defending champion Lynden to stay alive Thursday in the Class 2A girls state basketball -- and, in the end, looked good doing it -- is actually quite remarkable.

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Especially when compared to the Red Devils' Wednesday opener and the first half of their 40-31 triumph over the Lions, during which they looked, well, quite awful.

East Valley shot a toxic 8-for-53 (15 percent) in its first-round loss to Pullman and then actually went downhill from that over the first two periods Thursday, sinking just three of 22 field-goal attempts (13.6 percent) to trail 15-11 against a Lynden team that wasn't shooting much better.

"Six quarters of that. Dreadful," East Valley coach Robi Raab said. "And we've got kids who can shoot the ball, too. It's just a question of hitting some shots and getting into a rhythm."

They didn't find that rhythm at the SunDome, though, until the second half of Thursday's game, when they began adhering to one of the oldest axioms in the game: pound the ball inside.

As soon as the Red Devils began working the ball in to 6-foot-3 Annie Martinez and 5-10 Jamie Hodgson, that roach coach of an offense began purring like a Porsche.

Martinez scored all 11 of her points and Hodgson all seven of hers after halftime. Guard Yasamin Mohsenian found them three times for baskets, hitting Martinez twice with assist passes and setting up Hodgson once, during a 10-0 third-quarter run that put the Red Devils ahead 25-19.

"My coach told me to stop fading and go into the defense, to be the strong post that I am," Martinez said. "He wanted me to face up a lot more and make a move, go around people."

"He wanted us to pound it inside, make sure we had looks inside," added Hodgson, who twice made the assist passes that led to Martinez layups.

And, as typically happens when an offense starts having success in the lane, the defenders pull back, leaving the jump shooters open. When that happened at the outset of the fourth quarter, Martinez kicked the ball out to guard Kaylah Gonzales for an open 3-pointer that ignited an eight-point East Valley run, bumping the Red Devils' lead into double digits.

"They finally started to understand what the defense was giving them," Raab said. "They understood the spacing. Plus, Annie relaxed a little bit and Jamie relaxed and they played a great second half. But the big difference in the second half was the defense that Yasi (Mohsenian), Magaly (Carillo) and Riley (Ramynke) played on No. 20 (Lynden guard Hannah Shine), because she's a really outstanding player. We went box-and-one, some diamond-and-one, we mixed things up when we could. We went zone a little bit, went man at times, just trying to give them different looks."

The tactics worked to some degree, with Shine scoring six second-half points after putting up 10 before the intermission.

Gonzales finished with 11 points for East Valley (19-5), which will play Clarkston (12-13) at 9 a.m. Friday for a berth in Saturday's fifth-eighth place game. And after Wednesday's dismal debut, the chance to play for a trophy sounds pretty good to the Red Devils.

"It feels amazing," Hodgson said. "We didn't want to go out without a win."