Throughout the beginnings of the season, St. Anne has shown exactly why basketball is a team game.

Eight Cardinals found the scoring column during Tuesday night’s game against Momence, a game St. Anne won 61-46 on Jack Sikma Court in St. Anne. The win gave the Cardinals (5-2, 3-0 RVC) their fifth straight win and improved their conference winning streak to 15 dating back to last year. Momence (4-3, 2-1 RVC) saw a three-game winning streak end.

“We played as a team,” Cardinals forward Brandon Schoth, who led the team with 17 points, said. “We were sharing the ball, everybody got a lot of touches, we were doing the right things.”

Neither team was unable to pull away throughout most of the first quarter until the closing moments. With the score 9-8 in favor of St. Anne with 1:38 to go in the frame, the Cardinals got layups from Matthew Langellier, Trevor Van Pelt and Jackson Hawkins for a 6-0 run to make it 15-8 in the early stages of the second quarter.

From there, St. Anne never saw Momence get within one possession. For every Momence basket, the Cardinals had an answer. St. Anne would find holes inside Momence’s 2-3 zone that led to points in different ways.

The Cardinals made just one 3-pointer on the night from Schoth, which was their first field goal of the game. The rest of the points came inside the arc, mostly in the paint.

“For us, any time you can get the ball into the heart of the defense, it just collapses everything, which is going to give you wide open looks on the outside,” St. Anne coach Rick Schoon said. “Your best 3s are always your inside-out 3s.

“Our guys were able to get past Momence’s bigs quite a few times on the inside and especially Brandon [Schoth], he was able to finish around the basket.”

St. Anne looks to be a force this winter, and a big reason why the Cardinals may be is the depth of experience on their roster. In recent years it has taken St. Anne until the holiday tournaments to find its footing, but this year a hot start out of the gate has made even Schoon impressed.

“I’ll tell you what, these guys [have] really impressed me this year,” he said. “I told them after the game that if we can turn our weaknesses into positives, the sky’s the limit for this team.”

Despite a game-high 21 points and four three pointers by D’Angelo Hundley, Momence struggled to get any serious scoring run going against St. Anne. They never led after leading 6-5 midway through the first quarter.

Although the Cardinals never gave up the lead after pulling away in the first half, Momence stayed resilient and battled back to bring its deficit to as close as five points on multiple occasions.

“Resilience, playing through tough situations was something that we’ve really focused on a lot this season so far,” Momence head coach Kevin Ecker said. “I thought we were resilient, I thought we fought through as much as we could.

“A lot of it had to do with how St. Anne played. You’ve got to tip your hat to them for how they played tonight.”