urgency and intensity

When Sockeye and Furious play crap teams at sectionals, do they bring the same intensity and urgency that they do when they play each other? If they do, how they mentally maintain that high level for an entire tournament?

We had sectionals this weekend, and we played the first two games on Saturday fairly easily. Then in our last game of pool play, we played Bucknell. It was to win the pool and be in the championship bracket on Sunday morning. We were down by two points somewhere around half time, then we went on a run and ended up winning the game. Won our pool.

Next day - we know if we win our first game against Edinboro we are a lock to go to regionals. We play hard, bring the high intensity, but we don't win. All our big players made mistakes in the first half, and they capitalized and took the lead. I think we traded points in the second half, but they win. So know we are in the backdoor games. We play CMU and we know we have to win to keep going. We play hard, get an upwind break in the beginning of the game and keep that lead the whole time. We win, securing ourselves a bid to regionals.

So the next game is against Bucknell again, and it is for seeding at regionals. We know it's important, but I don't think we brought the same do-or-die sense of urgency that we had in the earlier games to go. Bucknell got the first upwind break, and essentially kept the same lead to start. We had our chances, but couldn't break back. Is this our fault? Of course it is, but how do we bring our play up to the same intensity we had in the two other games? We were still playing hard, but something was different. I'm not entirely sure what it was, or how to fix it though.

Personally, I guess the question will be answered for me if we bring our best playing to regionals, where every game will matter.