For many following local prep basketball, Mercer Island’s season-ending regional-round loss to eventual 3A state champs Rainier Beach could be seen as a triumph of sorts. Rainier Beach was nationally recognized by USA Today and MaxPreps, would go on to win its third-straight state championship and would compete in a national prep basketball tournament in New York. But to get there, the Vikings had to sweat for a hard-fought six-point victory over a smaller, less athletic Mercer Island team. Against a team that routinely put up 100 points a night, a 61-55 loss could seem heroic.

For those in the Mercer Island locker room, it was a missed opportunity, marking the fourth-straight year the Islanders failed to advance beyond the final 16 to the Tacoma Dome.

“I was expecting to win the game,” said senior captain David Emanuels. “People think that sounds crazy, but I knew that was the exact type of game it was going to be, where it would come down to the wire. I thought we were going to pull it out.”

Silver linings aside, the returning Islanders from last year’s team don’t want to go out with almost beating Rainier Beach as their lasting legacy. This year, Mercer Island hopes to finally earn that elusive win that sends them to Tacoma.

“We’ve made it to the round of 16 four years in a row and we don’t want to get lumped into that streak,” fellow captain Nick Taylor said. “We want to be the team that broke that streak. We want to make it to the Tacoma Dome.”

But the Islanders will have their work cut out for them, as the team graduated six varsity members, including three of its top four scorers in Kaleb Warner, Chris Lawler and Jake Stenberg. What the Islanders lost in offense, Mercer Island coach Gavin Cree hopes his team will make up defensively.

“A lot of our returning guys are defensive-minded guys, so we’re going to have to hang our hat on the defensive end,” Cree said. “We lost so much scoring from last season, I think it’s going to come along more slowly. But I’m expecting us to be good defensively right away.”

While the Mercer Island coach acknowledged the Islanders are a young team that will take time to develop, he sees an added depth to his squad among the younger players. With a roster potentially going ten deep, Cree said ultimately, the goal hasn’t changed for Mercer Island.

“Our goal is to get to the Tacoma Dome. We’ve fallen short of the final eight for four years in a row, and so our guys are determined to go beyond that point. Our goal is always to win a state championship, we’re never going to cut ourselves short of anything and set the bar too low. But in order to win a state championship, you gotta get to the final eight, so that’s our first step.”