Good defense and foul trouble is a messy combination for any basketball team to handle, and big leads can disappear in the blink of an eye.

On Thursday night on their own home court, the Longmont girls experienced the bitter aftertaste of such an experience when, after seeing players foul out or relegated to the bench in the fourth quarter, they fell to Evergreen in a 32-28 heartbreaker.

They began the game with a 12-0 lead.

“It’s tough, because we did a really good job in the first half of being patient, and then, in the second half, they extended the pressure a little bit more,” head coach Wade Kingsbury said. “That just made it difficult at times for us to maneuver around them. Really athletic, really long team we had to play tonight. We haven’t seen a zone extended like that this year.”

In the tale of two halves, senior power forward Savannah Pohl took the lead, both offensively and defensively, as she netted eight points. Senior small forward Stella Rulon added another six.

A strong defensive half from the Trojans saw the struggling Cougars score just four points — LHS led 16-4 at that point — but the momentum shifted significantly into the Cougars’ favor midway through the third quarter. The Evergreen zone forced Longmont to shoot from outside, and the Trojans never managed to come in from the cold.

Then the Trojans started getting haunted by fouls, eliminating scorers like Pohl from contention and further hurting their cause.“We haven’t seen a lot of zone this year and hadn’t worked a lot of offense against that,” Rulon said. “I think, initially, we maybe struggled finding open spots, but we stayed patient, swung the ball and we tried to mix it up.”

Coming into their first home game of the season, the Trojans enjoyed two straight victories that saw them net 47 points in each, but they couldn’t get their offense to click against the Cougars. Before that matchup, they enjoyed stellar rebounding, some 31 per game. Evergreen wouldn’t even let them crash the glass easily.

Longmont fell to 3-2 with the loss, and will return home on Friday night with the hopes of bouncing back against Bear Creek at 6:30 p.m.

“We definitely never gave up,” Kingsbury said. “Our defense was obviously really good in the first half, giving up four points.”