APEX - For three quarters, Enloe and Apex had battled neck and neck for the rights to move onto Friday's sectional round of the NCHSAA 4-A boys basketball playoffs. But the final quarter was all Enloe.

The Eagles hit 8-of-11 shots in the fourth quarter to run away with the 55-39 road win on Wednesday, becoming just the fourth team to win at Apex in the last two years.

After Apex started the game off with a 10-3 lead, including two 3-pointers that brought the home crowd to a deafening roar, but a veteran Enloe squad buckled down defensively.

"We knew that if we could withstand that first run that we'd probably be fine," senior guard Emanuel "Poobie" Chapman said. "We knew they were going to come out and punch us in the mouth, and they did."

The Cougars tied their low-point total mark on the year thanks in large part to its 3-for-19 performance from 3-point territory.

Tri-Nine Player of the Year Connor Belicic, a senior, finished with a season-low three points, as his counterpart Chapman, the CAP-7's Player of the Year, held him in check.

"We just pressured them," Chapman said. "If we gave them any room to breath, they were going to [score] all over us. We took them out of their game, made them rush a little bit."

The Eagles chipped into Apex's lead to end the first quarter down 14-11 and took the lead on a D.J. Rich 3-pointer late in the second quarter. The teams entered halftime with Enloe up 25-22.

Apex's Sunil Ram scored late in the third to bring the Cougars within a point, 33-32. But Enloe quickly advanced the ball upcourt, finding reserve forward Marcus Walker for an old-fashioned three-point play. The Eagles outscored Apex 22-7 after Ram's basket.

"I just thought [Enloe's] defense was awesome. We weren't able to execute anything that we've been running all year that's been effective for us," Apex coach Dave Neal said. "We just went bone-dry when we needed them ... we got some looks for three that I just knew were going to go down but they didn't."

In their final games for Apex, senior forward Weston Murphy had 13 points and Mike Fogg had 16.

The Eagles got 15 points from Wake Forest signee Melvin Tabb, 10 from Jared Blakney and 12 from Rich. — three players that were instrumental in last year's run to the East regionals.

"We have seven seniors, five of them have been with us for a good while now," Enloe coach Tommy Moore said. "The last thing I told them before we left is we were going to need every bit of senior leadership that they had to give us tonight [being] on the road, in a tough environment against a 1-seed and a great team that executes terrifically."

Enloe will now play at Riverside, the PAC-Six champ, on Friday with the winner advancing to Greenville for next week's regionals.

"We're breaking it down to one possession at a time, one word at a time — we're just breaking it down to make it last as long as it can," Chapman said.