Staff photo / Preston Byers. Ursuline’s Noah Bell puts up a contested shot against Archbishop Hoban on Tuesday in Youngstown.

YOUNGSTOWN — Tuesday could have been a big night for the Ursuline boys basketball program. The Irish were eyeing their fourth straight win and could have crowned a new scoring king in Jaylen Gunther as well.

Neither wound up happening, however, as visiting Archbishop Hoban throttled Ursuline 84-65 and held Gunther in check enough to make him fall shy of the record.

“Buttkicking from the beginning of the game ’till the end,” Irish head coach Keith Gunther said. “We came out, I told them what our defensive game plan was, and we did not follow the game plan from the beginning. You let a team get confident, and once you get down, it’s hard to recover.”

Ursuline kept pace with Hoban and even led at points during the first quarter. But the Knights began what would be a game-changing run in the final minutes of the period; down 12-9 with three minutes to go in the first, Hoban proceeded to outscore the Irish 18-4 over the course of a seven-minute span, flipping the contest on its head.

Although Ursuline managed to stem the proverbial bleeding down the stretch of the second quarter and keep the halftime deficit to 10 points, the Irish never got within single digits of the Knights again.

Hoban opened the third quarter with six straight, and despite back-to-back 3-point plays by Noah Bell, the Knights, benefiting from numerous second-chance opportunities and Ursuline turnovers, responded with a 10-3 run. They also nearly finished the period with seven unanswered points, but Jaylen Gunther made a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to cut the lead to 19.

In the fourth, with an Ursuline comeback already seeming nearly impossible, Hoban made sure of that with a barrage of triples. The Knights made 13 3-pointers on the night, courtesy of five different players, including Owen Hamilton, who made a game-high four.

“We go play a phenomenally athletic team (Summit County Day) on Sunday that was long, athletic, running, dunking, and then you play a team where our kids look down at the other end and look at some kids that don’t look overly athletic but are well-coached and just come out and kick your behind. That’s what it was,” Keith Gunther said. “We couldn’t guard them off the dribble, and when we did guard them off the dribble, they would kick it and knock down the threes.

“The other thing that hurt us was when they did miss a shot, we weren’t boxing out. They were killing us on the offensive glass also. Just a bad game for us. Awful, with the way we played. Awful, with our energy, especially coming off four out of our last five against really talented teams.”

Hamilton had a team-high 18 points and was one of six Knights to score at least eight Tuesday. Meanwhile, the Irish’s offensive duo of Bell and Jaylen Gunther combined for 53 of Ursuline’s 65 points. Bell, who was honored pregame for recently joining the 1,000-point club, finished with 25, while Gunther scored 28, falling seven points shy of breaking the school’s all-time record.

Ursuline (14-4) will be back in action at Notre Dame-Cathedral Latin on Friday before returning home to host Howland next Tuesday.