PEMBROKE – The Pembroke Academy boys’ basketball team led Manchester West 50-40 with 4:37 left in the fourth quarter on Tuesday night. With two minutes left, their lead was just 52-49. With 30 seconds left, it was tied, 56-56.

Pembroke nearly suffered an unfathomable collapse. But in overtime, the Spartans dug down.

“It’s just heart at that point, who wants it more,” said junior guard Evan Berkeley, who scored 22 points in Pembroke’s eventual 66-62 victory. “We had a crazy fan section hyping us up. Everybody around us was showing us love, and so it was just who wanted it more at that point. And we came out on top.”

Most teams that blow a late 10-point second-half lead don’t recover. For the Spartans, this was the very situation where their maturity and togetherness on the floor gave them the advantage.

“In the summertime, in the fall, if that would’ve happened, we would’ve folded and we would’ve lost,” said senior captain Joe Fitzgerald who led the way with 25 points. “But we showed maturity, we showed character, we showed that we’re a championship season team today.”

The game served as another reminder of why Pembroke is such a hard team to defend. Every time the Spartans needed a bucket, it seemed, Fitzgerald either drove to the basket for a layup or free throws, or he dished it to the corner for a teammate to knock down a 3-pointer.

“Joe does it all,” Berkeley said. “He can score from all three levels. When he is getting double-teamed and triple-teamed, that just opens all of us up, and so that’s what makes it so lethal as a team.”

In addition to Berkeley and Fitzgerald, senior Zach Al-Shawafi had 12 points on four 3-pointers. The Blue Knights (7-3) couldn’t lock in on any particular scorer.

“I always tell the kids, you don’t know when you’re going to get called into the game, but when you get in there, make an impact,” Pembroke coach Mike Donnell said.

And most of his players that saw the floor did just that.

While this season is the second straight year Pembroke’s viewed itself as a Division II title contender, it’s jumped out to a 10-1 start with a mostly new cast. Remember, the Spartans graduated nine seniors from last year’s runner-up team. But even though the roster looks quite different, the togetherness that elevated Pembroke last year seems to once again be the team’s calling card.

“You see them all the time; they’re a tight group,” Donnell said. “They play together. They don’t get nervous. I’m the one that gets nervous, not the kids. They just have a ton of confidence in themselves. Sometimes they do things that we would rather they not do, but they still got the job done.”

And as Donnell sat on the bench after the win in the mostly-empty gym that minutes before was raucous, there was no question in his mind why his group came out on top.

“This team doesn’t quit,” he said. “They continue to battle. We bend. We don’t break. They play together.

“One of the things we preach about all the time is in a horse race, it’s where the horse finishes, not where it starts. … When we went into overtime, the boys sat down, they looked at me and said, ‘Coach, we got this. We got this.’ We were the fortunate team tonight to pull it off.”