The girls piled their hands in the middle of the huddle.

“O.K.,” Lutz said. “One, two, three — hustle!”

Destiny, the senior point guard, made a 3-pointer. She hit another. Carroll Academy trailed by only 3, its smallest second-quarter margin of the season. Murmurs rippled through the crowd at the neutral court in Clarksburg. Bruceton stretched the lead to double digits. Destiny’s 3-pointer with one second left made the halftime score 24-16.

The couple of dozen Carroll Academy fans in attendance stood and gave the girls their biggest ovation of the season as they disappeared into the locker room.

“Carroll Academy girls have never won a game in the district tournament, ever!” Lutz shouted, talking faster than usual.

The girls looked on, their hands raised and palms out, Lutz’s mandated reminder during timeouts and halftimes to always keep their hands up on defense.

“Come on, girls,” cried Summer, a 17-year-old senior with a baby at home, a recently failed drug test in her file and a history of delinquency on her juvenile record.

Theirs may be a losing team, unappreciated and unloved. But for one coach and nine girls, on a day when they would be together for the last time, there was reason for optimism.

Champion Point Guard, Losing Coach

Lutz is a 36-year-old mother of two, with a twangy voice that can pierce the din of a classroom or the roar of a basketball crowd. She is a regular at the biggest church in town, and an occasional judge at beauty pageants, where her daughter used to compete.

She desperately wants to be viewed seriously as a coach. “Any good coach, I would challenge to come and do a year or two and see if they can turn a program around,” she said. “Because I thought the same thing.”

Lutz grew up a few miles away, in Gleason, where she was the point guard on a state championship team nearly 20 years ago. She played basketball at Bethel University in nearby McKenzie and earned a sociology degree. She spent several years doing counseling, then was home for two years after she and her husband had their first child.

When Randy Hatch, the Carroll Academy administrator, hired her to replace him as the girls coach in 2004, she never looked at the team’s record. Even though she had no head-coaching experience, she assumed she could overcome the disadvantages — the ever-changing roster, the inexperienced players, the lack of parental support.

“If someone were to look at my record, they’d probably think I can’t coach at all,” Lutz said.

On the first day of practice in October, Lutz asked her players some basic questions. Where is the free-throw line? What is traveling? How many players are on the court at a time?

Most of the girls replied with blank stares.

“Until Christmas, I was teaching them offense versus defense,” Lutz said. “We have a crash course in peewee basketball — dribbling, passing, shooting, defense.”

She knows that her record with a team that always loses may preclude her from coaching elsewhere someday. It gnaws at her. But she musters enthusiasm for the job — doggedly challenging referees, for example, or diving for loose balls in practice to set an example.

“I’m going to coach like we’re going to win a state championship,” Lutz said. “They deserve that.”

Players see her as a stable, trustworthy role model, unlike anyone they know. She is fiery, sassy and confident. She gives them pointers on everything from manners to hairstyles.

Typically, she starts games with a pep talk about fundamentals and effort, employs a diatribe at halftime and makes the postgame speech a life lesson about perseverance.

“A lot of people who are in the stands are people who don’t see what we’re winning at,” Lutz said.

And she started to cry.

Fans at Last, and a Chance to Win

The district playoff game fell on a Saturday, meaning no at-home pickup for the players. They needed to find a way to school. Hannah, a tall and well-mannered seventh grader, and Alleyah, a smiling tempest of an eighth grader, arrived first. They hung their teammates’ uniforms on hooks in the locker room.

One by one, the rest of the players arrived, to the mild surprise of Lutz and Hatch, who presumed that some parents would not provide rides for the girls. They changed into their uniforms in their tiny locker room. They brushed each other’s hair and showed each other YouTube videos on the school’s computers.

When it was time to go, they loaded gear into one van and slid into the bench seats. The game was at Clarksburg High School, about 10 miles south of Huntingdon.

“My dad doesn’t want us to win because he’s tired of coming to Huntingdon,” said Leslee, a ninth grader from a town about 20 miles away. Her mother died when Leslee was 7.

Lutz gathered the girls in a circle in the locker room. They held hands, bowed their heads and recited the Lord’s Prayer, which Lutz taught the girls at the beginning of the season.

“Hopefully not our last ballgame, but play your hardest,” Lutz said, and the girls headed out for warm-ups.

Four of the girls — a season high — had family members in the stands.

“I’m so glad to have people here,” Summer said to Destiny as she nodded toward her father, her infant son, DaMarion, and a few others. “It makes me so happy.”

One girl took a charge, something the team had worked on in practices late in the season. Jenna, a stoic junior, grabbed a couple of offensive rebounds. Destiny scored off a designed inbounds play. Constance made a 3-pointer.

Maybe, just maybe, this would be the one.

‘Give It All You Have’

Three nights earlier, Hatch took the boys and girls basketball teams to Memphis to see an N.B.A. game between the Grizzlies and the Minnesota Timberwolves. The dress code was loosened. The girls wore tight jeans and makeup and wore their hair down. They flirted with members of the boys team. Security director Patrick Steele was a bundle of nerves.

For many, it was their first time to Memphis, 100-plus miles away. They were awe-struck at the size of the buildings. After walking down Beale Street and entering 18,000-seat FedEx Forum, they rode an escalator — some for the first time — to the upper level. Some were scared of the height and sat stiffly in their seats. They were dazzled by the scoreboard, the lights and the sounds, much more than the basketball.

But now they were back in the sparsely populated gym in Clarksburg. They trailed by 8, their smallest halftime deficit of the season.

Lutz turned to Leslee, a rangy freshman.

“I need you to pick it up,” Lutz said. Leslee smiled.

Bruceton soon stretched the lead to double digits. Carroll Academy was besieged by its usual inadequacies — rebounding, turnovers, a scoring option besides Destiny. Summer missed two free throws. Miranda just missed a putback, which would have been her first points of the season. Bruceton outscored Carroll Academy, 16-2, in the third quarter, ending with a 10-0 run.

In the huddle, Lutz smiled at Destiny. She knew that, for her only player with previous high school basketball experience, this would be the end of her playing career. “Give it all you have,” Lutz said.

Destiny drove and drew fouls. She stopped and shot 3-pointers. She finished with a season-high 28 points.

The Lady Jaguars lost, 52-32. It was their biggest output and smallest losing margin of the 32-game season.

“I won the ballgame,” Lutz said in the locker room. “I won the ballgame because you gave me effort.”

The coach’s eyes were dry. But Destiny, Summer and several others cried.

Into the Dark

Lutz drove the van 10 miles back to Carroll Academy, and a pale, late-day sun drew long shadows on the landscape. The van was practically empty. All but three of the girls found rides home straight from the game. The usual postgame mix of music, whispers and gossip was replaced by quiet melancholy.

Back at the school, Hannah and Miranda carried the water bottles inside. Alleyah carried towels. They dumped the sweaty uniforms in the school’s washing machine.

Carroll Academy’s lone hallway was dark. The gym, a free-standing building nearby, was empty and locked. The white vans were lined up in the lot, waiting for Monday’s deployment to pick up the students.

A cold, late-winter wind blew, and the girls rushed to get into the warmth of awaiting cars, back into a life without a basketball team. In a moment, it seemed, they were scattered like leaves, and it was impossible to know just where they would be blown.

The losing streak, six years running, was dormant, at least until fall. The Lady Jaguars have lost 184 games in a row.