Four days after the Wallkill volleyball team experienced the euphoria of its first Section 9 championship on its home court, the Panthers experienced the other end of the emotional spectrum.

The Panthers won the first set on November 7 before dropping the next three in a 3-1 loss to the Section 1 champion Byram Hills Bobcats at Wallkill High School.

“This is obviously a tremendous season and I’m proud of them,” Wallkill coach Julie Michella said. “They have a ton of fight in them. They lost to the last point of this. The team chemistry that we’ve had this year has been phenomenal. They play for each other. They play as hard as they can. Tonight was just not our night.”

From the way the match started, it looked like it may have been the Panthers’ night as Maya Allessandro took the service line and led the Panthers with six straight points.

However, the Bobcats rallied to tie the set at 14-14, and then again at 20-20. They even took a brief one-point lead twice. Then a short hit by Byram Hills’ Claire Mauney gave the Panthers a 24-23 lead.

Then Kaylee DeGroat finished the set with a block to give the Panthers a 1-0 lead.

The Bobcats opened a seven-point lead in the third set before the Panthers battled back to 22-20. However, the Bobcats scored three straight points and ended the third set on an ace by Lucia Delfosse.

The fourth set ran in a similar fashion as the Bobcats ran off a 16-5 lead behind a long service run by Nikolet Vataj. However, the Panthers had one more fight in them, battling back to 23-15 before Madison Stauss went to the service line.

Before the Bobcats could knock her off the back line, the Panthers had closed the match to 24-20. However, when a return hit by DeGroat hit the antennae, the Panther’s season ended.

But no matter how bleak it looked, the Panthers didn’t go quietly into the offseason.

“It shows the heart that this team has,” Michella said. “They don’t let things rattle them. They are always ready and willing to fight back. I wish that we could have put some stuff together a little bit sooner so that we had a little bit more of a chance to battle back some of those points. But they did a phenomenal job.”