Richard Grenier has seen it all in his long career as a high school basketball coach, but he hasn’t seen many fourth quarters like the one his Toll Gate team authored on Saturday. 

Trailing for the majority of their Division III quarterfinal matchup, the third-seeded Titans out-scored Central Falls 17-1 in the final quarter and stormed to a 55-43 victory and a berth in the semifinals. 

“How many times are you going to outscore a good team like that 17-1 in the fourth quarter?” Grenier said. “It certainly wasn’t an easy way to do it. But that’s how it is in the playoffs - nothing easy about it. You have to out-work and out-hustle teams. I thought in the first half, [Central Falls] did that. And in the second half, we did that, especially in the fourth quarter.” The Titans are in the semifinals for the first time since 2019, when they finished as the D-III runner-up. They’ll face No. 2 Times 2 Academy on Thursday night. 

“It’s crazy,” senior Brayden Healey said. “I’ve played with most of these kids my whole life. The last few years, we haven’t had the greatest teams. It feels awesome to be doing this now.”

There were ingredients in place for an upset on Saturday. The Titans beat Central Falls by just two points in the regular season and hadn’t played in more than a week. The Warriors entered as the hottest team in the league, winners of eight in a row, including a preliminary-round playoff game. 

Central Falls made a strong bid for the upset. Leandro Vargas scored the first 11 points of the game, hitting three 3-pointers and a mid-range jump shot. The Titans eventually came back with a 10-0 run of their own, but the Warriors continued to play well. They led 16-12 at the end of the first quarter. Jamilson De Pina Almeida capped a strong second quarter with a three-point play at the 31-second mark, and the Warriors went to halftime with a 34-24 advantage. 

“Our game this year has been defense. We have been a grind-it-out defensive team, and we have to score off our defense,” Grenier said. “At halftime, I said, ‘Guys, have we really played our defense yet? Have we really worked hard enough?’ And then you saw it in the second half.” 

Cracks started to show for the Warriors in the third quarter. They managed just one field goal in the first six minutes of the quarter and saw a 10-point lead dip to one. Point guard Sire Hazard was relegated to the bench with four fouls. Almeida kept his team afloat with four points over the final 1:48, which made it 42-38 as the teams headed to the fourth quarter. 

The Warriors’ lone point of the fourth quarter came on a free throw by Alex Torres with 4:41 remaining. They missed every shot they took from the field. And more often, they turned the ball over before even getting a shot. Toll Gate’s half-court trap defense was difficult to handle. 

“The biggest thing for us coming into the game was that we had to take care of the ball,” Central Falls coach Joe Handy said. “No turnovers. And we didn’t do it in the fourth quarter. That killed us.”

The Titans ran with their chances, taking their first lead at 44-42 with 4:52 left on a fast-break layup by Liam Leahy. After the Torres free throw, the Titans ended the game with 11 straight points. Damola Oremosu scored four in a row and Jack Colvin hit the dagger with a 3-pointer. 

“We trusted ourselves,” Healey said. “We started off a little slow, but we knew what we could do. We knew we could pull it off at the end.”

Healey paced Toll Gate with 17 points. Oremosu finished with 14. Vargas scored a team-high 19 points for the Warriors and Almeida tallied 17. 

“Once we started playing defense, the crowd got into it,” Healey said. “We were just lights on from there.” 

Grenier praised junior Jayden Roache for his contributions in the fourth quarter. Roache forced several of Central Falls’ turnovers from his spot at the top of the trapping defense. 

“Jayden Roache was a big star for the JV team and we’ve been playing him more and more,” Grenier said. “He’s so fast and he causes so much disruption. He’s kind of the unsung hero.”

The Titans will now turn their attention to the semifinal date with Times 2. The Eagles surged late in the season to grab the No. 2 seed, winning games over top contenders Toll Gate, Prout and Ponaganset in February. The win over Titans was by two points. 

“TImes 2 is a very talented team,” Grenier said. “We lost by two at the buzzer because we didn’t block somebody out. It should be interesting.”

Tipoff is set for 8 p.m. on Thursday at St. Raphael.