AZUSA, Calif. — Yesterday, a team event hit was an added benefit. In Oregon’s semifinal, it was a necessity.

The Ducks lost four of their first five events against No. 3 Quinnipiac University. Their go-to event, tumbling, struggled and Briya Alvarado stumbled on her solo pass. They walked out for the team event with a lead less than a point. Quinnipiac hit. That’s when Oregon needed what it got a day ago.

The Ducks didn’t get it today.

In a rematch of last year’s semifinal, the script was so nearly the same. With team event on the line, though, it was Quinnipiac that turned in the second-highest score of the tournament so far, and Oregon couldn’t match it. The 260.990-256.010 final score ballooned and belied a meet that inched closer as it ran on. Without the team event that it needed, the Ducks’ season ended in the semifinal round.

One mistake could’ve made the meet, and it came early for No. 2 Quinnipiac. For a few seconds, sophomore top Julia Turrisi tried to recover her balance in the Bobcats’ six-element acro heat. She wobbled. She hit the floor, and in the gym, an ever-so-slight, “Oh” was released.

That’s all Oregon needed to recover a first-event deficit and surge into the lead. The Ducks did their part with a six-element acro heat that hit for the second day in a row. Despite scoring lower in both five and seven-element than it did on Thursday, that 2.300-point swing was enough to put Oregon ahead in an otherwise neck-and-neck meet.

Quinnipiac won a pair of first-half events off the back of ever-so-slightly better scores. The margins thinned: Neither a 0.300-point compulsory win nor a 0.050-point pyramid win were enough to make up the deficit from that six-element fall, but they did cut it. Oregon led by 2.075 at the half, but the momentum belonged to the Bobcats.

On the Ducks’ side of the mat, Selah Bell was back in Oregon’s open pyramid heat after Cassidy Cu took her place in the quarterfinal round. The Ducks had used Cu, a sophomore top, in the heat yesterday after swapping her into it in the days before the meet. The change on Friday was tactical; they wanted to show off what Cu could do in the first meet.

“With Selah, we know what we’re going to get, pretty much every single time,” Susnara said. “And so we were like, ‘Okay, this is a big meet. We’re going to go back to what we’ve been competing all year.”

Despite the adjustment, the score was the same as it was a day ago: 9.775, which wasn’t good enough for an event win. Neither were its efforts in toss, where the Bobcats stacked back-to-back event wins and cut the margin to 1.325 points. 

Then, with just one event win in four tries, it had to come to tumbling. Against Gannon, the event extended an already-enormous advantage. It wasn’t the story on Friday.

The Ducks bettered the Bobcats in each of the first four heats, but it was in the last two where the gap closed. Two of the top three heat scores of the day came in Quinnipiac’s final two passes, a 9.900 six-element and 9.775 open heat, while Oregon turned in a 9.500 and an 8.800. In the latter, Alvarado felt something different. 

“It definitely felt a little different than usual — a little of a mishap — but I fought through to finish as much as I could, because I fight as much as I can,” Alvarado said.

It wasn’t that the Ducks fell over and over. It wasn’t that Quinnipiac hit everything, either. It wasn’t a major fall or a huge step off; the only example of either came in the Bobcats’ showing. It was the little things that created the difference. Susnara was crying when the team event ended. The tears, she said, came from pride.

“I was really, really proud of the performance, and I knew it was going to be close,” Susnara said. “Quinnipiac put out a great performance — very, very clean — and I think they have a well deserved score in that, and I don’t want to take that away from them.”

As the Ducks huddled on their sideline, the Bobcats bounced head coach Mary Ann Powers up and down along theirs. This wasn’t the goal in Susnara’s eyes, and despite those 12 heats of event finals on Sunday, there’s a reason she walked into the press conference and apologized in advance for tears.

“It can feel defeating, even though we had a great showing today,” she said.

The prevailing emotion, though, was grace. It’s what Susnara talked about. It’s what the longest-tenured athlete on the team, Blessyn McMorris felt. 

“I wanted to make sure that the girls knew that even though it wasn’t what we wanted, it was still so powerful to end the way that we did, together,” McMorris said. “We fought every last second. and we did it together and we had each other’s backs and that’s all you can ask for, really, in a team sport.”