They’ve been friends since they were small kids, Dani Laughlin and Abbi Stransky.

They went to Iowa Hawkeye football games together.

They played basketball in the Lone Tree League together.

They went to each other’s homes.

“It’s very cool,” Dani said. “We’ve grown up together, we’ve been going to school together since we were in pre-school.”

Abbi says her earliest memory was playing in the Lone Tree League with Dani.

Now, as varsity basketball players in their junior year at Highland High School, Laughlin and Stransky each scored their 500^th career points separated by just one game and four nights, Dani on the 28^th of January and Abbi on the 1^st of February.

And so, imagine the emotions surfacing as Stransky, the Huskies’ leading scorer this season, lay on her back underneath the basket in the final minutes of a postseason tournament game February 10, unable to get up and holding her knee.

The Huskies were in the midst of an intense battle with Lisbon in a Class 1A regional playoff opener. Stransky fought two Lisbon players for possession of a loose ball. She crashed to the floor.

The Highland gym quickly turned from noise to absolute silence.

Laughlin stood there and wasn’t really thinking about a playoff game. She was thinking about her friend.

“That scared me a lot,” Dani said. “I was struggling not to cry. I couldn’t look at her because I didn’t want her to be out.”

As Dani is telling this story long after the game was over, a night that ended with the Huskies winning their first postseason game since 2019 and Abbi being lifted up and carried to the locker room by head coach Jody Fink, Dani’s voice is cracking with emotion.

“I gave her a big hug in the locker room,” Dani said. “I was like, ‘We did this for you, Abbi.’ “

Stransky went down with 1:10 left in regulation and the score tied. After several minutes of being attended to, she was helped into a hallway and then was assisted into the front row of the bleachers, where she watched teammate Sarah Burton score a basket in the final minute to force a 49-49 tie and overtime.

Somehow, she hobbled across the court with more assistance and to the Huskies team bench, where she watched the overtime period, half watching and half burying her face in a towel because of the pain.

“I can tell that, the look on her face, she knew something was wrong,” said Laughlin, wbo was on the court at the time of the mishap. “She just wanted to break down because she knows she can’t get up. She couldn’t.”

When you tear an anterior-cruciate ligament, as Abbi did, you can’t move.

It’s not likely that Dani had ever seen that, not from Abbi, a determined girl who played on the Highland football team as a freshman and a sophomore, and used to play in the boys games with Dani when they were in elementary school.

“She’s a competitor,” Fink said. “It doesn’t matter what it is. It could be Euchre and she wants to compete. It could be checkers and she wants to dominate you. That’s the competitive nature she has. And she can bring that out in other girls. I mean, her intensity brings the other girls up.”

Stransky did precisely that before she was hurt. The Huskies were down by eight points and the game was slipping away when Stransky simply took over. She scored five points in the third quarter and hit her first three shots in the fourth quarter.

“She was a fire in this game,” Laughlin said. “When she went down, everyone on the team was like, ‘Oh, crap.’ Because she was the one. I just think, everyone was like, Abbi would do this for us. We took it in our own hands and did it for her.”

A basket by Laughlin with 1:55 left in the overtime and a free throw by Kenzi Hora with 5.9 seconds left paved the way to a 54-52 win and a spot in this week’s regional quarterfinal.

The Huskie players celebrated their victory and then greeted Stransky on the bench because she was unable to get up. Fink came over, hugged her, picked her up in his arms and carried her into the locker room.

For all those times that Abbi carried her team, on this night the team would carry her.

“The girls’ perseverance, very proud of them for what they did there,” Fink said. “Abbi’s kind of our heart and soul.”

And the heart is crying a bit.

After just a couple of days, the Huskies learned that Abbi had torn her ACL. Season over.

“I just knew that she would fight to the end for us,” Dani said. “So I wanted to do it for her. I had her on my mind the whole game.”

News columnist Paul Bowker can be reached at bowkerpaul1@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: a@bowkerpaul.