Washington got as close as two points in the fourth quarter of Tuesday’s 69-59 loss to Southwest Edgecombe. It made all of the Pam Pack’s missed free throws even more painful. The Pam Pack made just 1-of-10 attempts from the charity stripe in the first half.

“That kills you,” Pam Pack coach Steve Flowers said. “I told them at halftime, ‘They’re giving you points and you won’t take them.’”

The visiting Cougars scored the first seven points of the game to build a lead they’d never surrender. It set a tone for the game: they would take just about whatever they wanted in the paint.

Southwest Edgecombe got to the line for three 3-point plays in the first eight minutes, and converted on two of them. Washington kept the Cougars quiet from long range, but couldn’t stop them from driving to the basket.

“We weren’t stopping the drives to the hole and we weren’t helping,” Flowers said. “If we did help, then it was an easy bounce pass. We gave up too many easy buckets. … There were a lot of fouls, and dumb fouls. Thomas (Edwards) is not a shot blocker.”

Changes to Washington’s starting lineup saw Suae Poe start the game, but foul trouble forced early substitutions.

Mark Halbert knocked down a pair of treys late in the first, including one at the buzzer, to trim Washington’s deficit to four, 20-16. Both teams went cold in the second, though. The Pam Pack didn’t get its first bucket of the quarter until Malik Bell’s layup with 2:11 left in the half. That would have been the only one, too, if not for Suae Poe’s half-court buzzer beater.

The Cougars built a 44-31 lead in the third quarter, but Washington didn’t give up on its 2-A Eastern Plains Conference opener. Poe got a layup to spark a 9-0 run to cut the visitors’ lead to just 44-40. Bell got a steal and turned it into a 3-point play at the other end. Sharwan Staton capped it off by faking a pass to the corner during a fastbreak and putting the layup in himself.

Flowers called a timeout trailing 57-52 with 3:19 left to play. Staton knocked down a 3-pointer to make it a 2-point game, but Washington couldn’t get the stops it needed at the other end to tie things up. The Pam Pack fouled late to try and comeback, but the Cougars converted on their opportunities at the line.

“That’s what I told them at the timeout. We can’t afford to trade shots. We have to make stops,” Flowers said. “We score, then we let them score. We score, then and-1. You’ve got to have stops.”

The Pam Pack shooters were largely cold from long range in their first game back from the Christmas layoff.

“On average, we hit six a night,” Flowers said. “It’s just a bad shooting night, but we’ve got to understand it’s a bad shooting night and take different shots.”

The conference-opening loss was only the beginning of a long week back to start 2017. Washington traveled to Jones Senior on Wednesday for non-conference action and will make the trek to Farmville Central on Friday.