Amid a flurry of excited screams and tearful hugs, Emma Bergstrom, then a sophomore at Interlake High School, looked shocked.

Her Saints had just defeated Cedarcrest 1-0 in the 2A state title game to give the school only its second team sport championship, the first in more than 30 years. Interlake didn’t just go unbeaten through the postseason, the team did not allow a goal in four state tournament games and put on a thoroughly dominant performance that began with a second place finish during the regular season, behind only 3A state runner-up Liberty.

For Bergstrom, who along with current University of Washington player Isabel Farrell joined the prep team for the first time in 2011 after starring with club sides, the joy wasn’t in the win, but in the teammates and classmates she shared it with.

With their own move to class 2A now final, Sammamish hopes to mirror that success in coming years.

After dropping to Class 2A for the 2008-09 school year, Interlake saw a major boon to boys and girls team and individual sports in its athletic program, including playoff berths in every season and a handful of state titles.

During their years together in 3A, Sammamish was actually more successful in team sports, as the football, boys basketball, boys soccer, girls soccer, softball and volleyball teams made a trip to state at least once.

But only one of those has come since 2008.

The Totems had low enough numbers to join Interlake in 2A that year, but balked because of a lack of information regarding the logistics behind postseason competition. After watching as their rivals have piled up playoff appearances and state titles, Sammamish was ready to pull the trigger this time around.

“We have more information and a lot longer to think about all the different scenarios and decisions,” Sammamish athletic director Pat McCarthy said. “We were able to look at how it impacted Interlake and have more of an understanding about what direction we would be going in terms of travel and how classes were affected.”

Assistant football coach Eric Harrington, a member of the Totems’ state-final football team in 1999 (the only in school history to make the tournament) and coach with the program for the past several years, said keeping the casual athlete involved in athletics in the face of mounting losses is always a challenge, but one the school’s coaches must continue fighting.

“Some years are better than others,” Harrington said. “The real issue is even when we’re struggling, finding a way to keep those kids coming back.”

Coaches, athletes and administrators around the school hope that moving to Class 2A, and the renewed opportunity for postseason play that comes with, could soon make that problem a thing of the past.

Despite its recent athletic success, Interlake is still far from a jock factory.

With a high concentration of International Baccalaureate, Advanced Placement (71 percent) and Gifted Program students on campus full time or solely for those programs, the athletic programs often take a back seat to the many outstanding academic feats Interlake students regularly tally.

Art Kuehn, who led Cedarcrest to the 2A state football playoffs in the 1990s and also played in the NFL for the Seahawks, became the athletic director at Interlake during the 2004-05 school year. He said there is no doubt the move to 2A and corresponding results have changed the perception of the school’s sports teams within the building and at least begun to reconcile the athletic and academic cultures.

“Since we moved to 2A, we’ve had quite a bit of success,” Kuehn said. “Success breeds confidence and confidence breeds a happy school.”

Sammamish has an even more unique culture within its student body, with 32 percent classified as economically disadvantaged, seven percent more than any other high school in the district. It is also the smallest school in the BSD, a title it has held since the 2008-09 school year. But those challenges are nothing new for the Totems.

Harrington said the difference in the state championship year and the downtrodden seasons since is a collective consciousness in the student body and tight-knit relationships that reach back to childhood. He emphasized that it only takes one especially close group of seniors to provide the spark that can ignite school and community support for a team.

“We had 12 or 13 seniors that year that all grew up playing together and all wanted it since their first day of football,” Harrington said. “We still haven’t had the seasons we’ve wanted to have, so getting those kids to come back even though they’re struggling has been tough.”

But with an abbreviated road to the playoffs in team sports that will pit Sammamish against 2A Seamount teams and a talent pool in tennis and golf that will be on-par with other 2A competition at districts and state, that struggle could pay off.