Trevor Hudgins began his postgame remarks Thursday night emphatically. Intentionally. He said the words slowly, without skipping a beat.

“That huge monkey is off our back. Finally,” he said.

And he was right.

In an eerily similar situation as a season ago, in the first round of sub-state, the junior guard and the Manhattan High boys basketball team hosted Washburn Rural Thursday — the same team that ended the Indians’ season last year.

But this time was different. This time, Manhattan won.

It was a 56-39 decision, and with the win, the Indians earned a date with Wichita East Saturday evening, with a trip to the 6A state tournament hanging in the balance.

But that is a different story, one that has yet to be told.

Manhattan made it a feasible tale, however, with Thursday’s win over Rural.

“It just feels really good,” Hudgins, who finished with a team-high 16 points, said. “We were going to get this one.”

That desire lit up in Hudgins’ eyes when the second half began, after his team entered the break trailing by three, at 24-21. Both Hudgins and his team seemed reinvigorated, knowing that their season, after making history with a 10-0 start and smashing several records along the way, was at stake.

But the third quarter made it seem not so.

The Indians ripped off a 13-0 run to start the third quarter, a period of nearly five minutes that sent the north gym into a frenzy. Rural coughed up the ball on each of its first four possessions of the third quarter, and Manhattan capitalized on each: first with two free throws from Hudgins, then with a triple from senior Gabe Awbrey, then via a Hudgins layup, and finally with a three from junior Tommy Ekart. The ground seemed to tremble with noise.

Ekart’s triple gave Manhattan a 34-24 lead and capped the momentum-swinging run, and head coach Benji George explained that the run may have come down to simply making shots.

“I think seeing the ball through the net was huge for us,” George said. “When we very first took the lead, it was almost like a change in mentality for us. It was like, ‘OK, here we go.’”

The Junior Blues turned it over eight total times in the third, and Manhattan continued to thrash them for it: Awbrey’s layup was the final MHS basket of the quarter, and it came off a Rural turnover.

Awbrey played the game with a separated AC joint in his left shoulder. His 15 points, though, came at an opportune time, even with the inevitable rustiness that came with not having practiced the days before the game.

“It was a little rusty. Some of my shots were a little bit flat,” he said. “But as long as I can be out there, helping our team compete and win games.”

The 36-29 lead the Indians toted into the fourth frame was never, really, in danger. Washburn Rural sliced the deficit to seven, at 42-35, with four and a half minutes to play, but Manhattan proved too much. Hudgins added six points in the fourth to keep Rural at bay and to shake the postseason peskiness MHS had discovered in the Junior Blues.

“We came out loose and confident in the second half,” Awbrey said. “We guarded hard; got up in our press; knocked down shots; got some easy buckets in transition that got us going. And once we get rolling, sometimes we can get going pretty good.”

But it didn’t start ideally for Manhattan.

That’s because it was greeted, from its very first trip up the hardwood, by a 1-3-1 Washburn Rural zone, a defensive arrangement against which the Indians could muster almost nothing. Manhattan managed a season-low six points in the first period and lagged behind the shooting-oriented Junior Blues 10-6 after one.

Rural’s four triples in the first half didn’t help Manhattan’s case, either.

“[The zone] slowed us down a little bit. We just were not fundamentally sound,” George said. “We weren’t pass faking; we weren’t stepping into gaps; the things we worked on all week. We kind of lost our minds a little bit.”

The zone’s effectiveness began to deteriorate, though, when MHS went on a quick 7-0 run to trim the lead to one, at 18-17.

Rural, however, responded with threes on back-to-back possessions, two trips down the floor that seemed to trample the momentum the Indians had unearthed.

But that’s not how the half ended. Instead, Manhattan got the half’s final two baskets when seniors Christian Carmichael and Robbie Ostermann converted on layups underneath, turning what could have been a steep seven-point slope into a manageable three-point deficit.

“Getting it back to a one-possession game was huge,” George said. “If we go in the locker room down seven or eight, it’s a whole different story in terms of what the mentality is.”

Manhattan’s mentality, though, can be transferred off Washburn Rural now and onto Wichita East.

The meeting will feature East’s Xavier Kelly, a 6-5 forward committed to play defensive end at Clemson in the fall, who will offer matchup problems around the rim.

“We’re going to have to be aggressive down low,” Hudgins said. “We know he’s going to be big, strong, physical; so we’re going to have to match that. Everyone has to crash.”

The Manhattan-Wichita East clash carries on the week’s theme of redemption for the Indians, who, after exorcising the demon that was Rural, will be on the hunt for further atonement against the Blue Aces, a club to which the Indians fell in overtime at the Tournament of Champions in January.

This time, the contest will decide a state spot.

It is a hunt Hudgins said his team is capable of completing.

“We know we can do what we should have done at TOC,” Hudgins said. “So, yeah. Pretty excited.”