The Spartans dominated from one end of the field to the other against Bothell-Northshore, though most of the action seemed to be in front of the visitors’ goal.

“I think all the kids played hard,” Visco said with a bit of understatement.

Visco said he never gave much thought to what the final outcome would be of Tuesday’s game, or whether it would be a closer contest.

“You know what? You never know until the first minute goes,” he said.

“These guys made the playoffs, and any team can step it up in the playoffs. There’s any number of teams that can win the state championship,” Visco said.

It was easy to see, however, what went right against Bothell-Northshore.

“Our transition game. Picked up a ground ball, came down, one, two, three passes, goal. We played well in transition, and that included the long poles,” he said of his defenders.

Jacob Knostman, the team’s senior attacker who just earned All American honors, agreed with his coach’s assessment.

“We ran the transitions very well, we fought hard on ground balls,” he said.

“We got a little sloppy at times with some turnovers, but we made up for it with the ground balls and put our shots in,” Knostman said.

He said he was looking forward to the semifinal against Auburn Riverside, a team Bainbridge defeated 14-7 on the final day of the regular season.

“I expect it will be a physical game. We played them last week, so there’s a little bit of tension and readiness to play against,” he said.

Sean Maier said he was glad to see his fellow Spartans come out hard for the win.

“It’s nice to see the guys are willing to throw a body or do anything they have to, to get the ball back. And that’s a good sign going into our next game,” Maier said.

“Anyone going into the playoffs is a good team,” added Kaegan Ingrasci. “We knew that they had an All American on attack [Drew Tosaya], we knew that they had some good defenders and some other guys that are pretty good at supporting them.”

“We’ve played with some of these guys, so we knew coming in that they weren’t just going to give it to us,” Ingrasci said. “We knew we had to come in and work.”

Though Bainbridge is playing a team in the final four it has just beaten, the Spartans said they weren’t looking past Auburn Riverside.

“We’re going to see a lot more physical game,” Coach Visco said.

Beyond that, time will tell.

“We always play one game at a time. I couldn’t tell you during the season what games we had the next week,” he said.