SOUTH PARIS – With a week to prepare the Cony Rams for Friday night’s game with undefeated Oxford Hills, coach Bruce Hunt might have worried that they would peak too soon in anticipation of their biggest game of the year.

At game time, however, Cony played with more poise and patience than the Vikings, and handed them their first loss of the year as a result.

Trailing by a bucket at the start of the fourth quarter, the Rams went on a 12-0 run, then held off a late Oxford Hills surge for a 66-60 victory.

“There isn’t anybody that went in the ballgame today that didn’t give us what they were supposed to,” Hunt said. “As long as we keep accepting those roles, we’re pretty damned good.”

“Cony wanted the game more than we did,” Oxford Hills coach Scott Graffam said. “They played with a certain amount of desperation that we didn’t even come close to matching.”

The Vikings (10-1) seemed to come out flat, particularly on the defensive end. Cony jumped to a 17-14 lead at the end of the first quarter by staying patient on offense. They waited for the defense to break down and often discovered open lanes to the hoop. When they did miss a shot, Doug Joerrs (game-high 20 points and 10 rebounds) was usually there to clean it up.

“We didn’t play defense at all,” Graffam said. “I think that’s how teams should play against us (offensively). If they can control the tempo and wait 15 or 20 seconds to take a shot, we don’t sustain our defense long enough.”

The Rams (7-2) led by as much as nine in the first half. They shut out the Vikes’ top scorer, Corey Tielinen (12 points, all in the second half, 10 rebounds), and Oxford Hills shot itself in the foot by missing from the charity stripe (4-for-14 in the first half, 7-for-20 for the game).

“We did key on (Tielinen),” Hunt said. “I thought the people that we rotated through on him, Adam Normandin and Marc Beaudoin, did a tremendous job of not giving him a lot of good looks. You can’t score if you don’t get good looks, and he didn’t have very many in the first half.”

Leif Kothe and Matt McDonnell (11 points apiece) pulled the Vikings within two going into halftime. Oxford Hills took a five-point lead midway through the third on a Rob McVety hoop and Tielinen’s first points (a 3-pointer) of the game. The Rams battled back to within 46-44 at the end of the quarter.

Six points from Myles Whitlock (11 points) sparked the Rams’ fourth-quarter outburst. Oxford Hills missed its first nine shots from the field in the quarter, finally getting on the board on a Tielinen hoop that made it an eight-point game with 3:43 left.

Tielinen later cut the deficit to four with a steal and layup with 1:54 left. But the Rams, who struggled from the free-throw line as much as the Vikings in the first half (2-for-7) found the touch down the stretch (16-for-22 in the second half) and never allowed Oxford Hills to get any closer.