PEARL — It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t pretty. But after nearly two years, the Warren Central Lady Vikes didn’t care what victory looked like or how they got it. They just cherished the moment.

Camara Evans scored 11 of her game-high 16 points in the fourth quarter, and Warren Central’s girls basketball team beat Pearl 34-30 on Thursday night to snap a 35-game losing streak.

Warren Central’s last win was on Jan. 27, 2023. It lost its final four games in the 2022-23 season, did not win at all in 2023-24, and dropped the first five games this year. This was the first time in 15 games that the Lady Vikes have scored more than 30 points.

“It is great. I have never watched the time so hard in my life,” said Warren Central coach Heather Casey, who also got her first career victory. “We’ve been working toward it, we’ve been talking about it, we’ve been close. I’ve seen spurts where it’s there, but we just can’t get there. Getting them to believe that you can do it when they hadn’t seen it, that’s hard.

“But we grind, we work hard in practice, and we tell ourselves we are going to win,” Casey continued. “We came into this game thinking we’re going to win. That was the focus today — only winning. Don’t worry about how we do it. Don’t worry about the mistakes. Win.”

Nothing good comes easy, and this was no exception for the Lady Vikes. They trailed for the first three quarters and did not take their first lead until Kelsey Snowden scored inside to make it 22-20 with 5:55 left in the game.

Evans took over from there. After the teams swapped baskets and the lead, Evans scored six straight points to put the Lady Vikes ahead 30-23. A basket by Arrionna Jenkins capped the 15-3 run with a minute to go.

Jenkins finished with six points.

“That’s the first time in the fourth quarter where we’ve been in the game, so they could see it,” Casey said. “I think seeing is believing, and the more they saw it they were like, ‘Oh my goodness, we can win this game.’ It just brought energy we hadn’t had so far.”

The Lady Vikes had a hard time finishing, though. Pearl’s Jordan Edwards and Kennydi O’Neal each converted steals into layups, and Edwards made two free throws to cap a dizzying blitz in which the Lady Pirates hacked a nine-point deficit to two in a span of 50 seconds.

Finally, Evans sank two free throws with 10 seconds left and Pearl missed a shot on the other end to close it out.

“We had to calm down and take it slow, because if not we were going to mess up and lose the game,” Evans said. “I’m proud of us, and I’m glad that we did good and we took the dub.”