In three short days, the Bobcats and Rams will run it back.

That gives the Marshalltown boys’ basketball team 72 hours to figure out what to change to take down Southeast Polk in the first round of postseason play.

The Rams got the better of the Bobcats in Friday’s regular-season finale, outscoring MHS 17-9 in the fourth quarter of a 59-50 victory inside the Roundhouse.

Southeast Polk (6-16) led by as many as eight points in the first half of a game that became a back-and-forth battle once the Bobcats (9-12) got back to even. An 8-0 run by the Rams in the first quarter gave them the early edge, but Marshalltown wasn’t about to let them run away with the prelude to postseason play.

Southeast Polk hosts Marshalltown at 7 p.m. Monday in Pleasant Hill in the opening round of Class 4A Substate 7 action, putting some extra emphasis on Friday’s regular-season finale.

“At first it was kind of shocking because I’ve never had that happen before,” MHS head coach Michael Appel said of last Monday’s bracket release. “The more I thought about it I really didn’t think it was a bad thing. You’re able to make adjustments and treat it like a two-game series. I feel like our guys respond really well when we watch film and understand what teams’ tendencies are and learn from how they guard us and learn how to execute much better.”

Neither team committed more than eight turnovers in the matchup of future postseason foes, but both teams played purposeful defense against an opponent they obviously had spent time scouting.

Southeast Polk junior guard Bode Goodman came up short of his 21.3 point-per-game average, but his team-leading 17 got him over 1,000 for his career (1,011). Marshalltown assigned senior guard Carter Giannetto to hassle Goodman by face-guarding him throughout the contest, and it reined in 4A’s fifth-leading scorer for a while.

Goodman got 12 of his points in the second half, including a deep 3-pointer and a pair of free throws in the fourth quarter.

“We didn’t change anything really other than how we want to guard No. 2 (Goodman), their best player, but we would have done that with any team,” Appel said of his defensive strategy. “We do have some new things saved for Monday offensively that I think will work well.

“We’ll watch film, take away what they did and implementing that on Monday will be huge for us. There’s a lot of things open there that we were just missing a little bit.”

Marshalltown didn’t make all of the makeables or take all of the takeables, Appel said, and those will be necessary to win Monday’s substate pairing.

“We had a few breakdowns here and there, a few 50-50 balls that were huge that we didn’t come up with,” he said. “In a game that close, every possession matters. We can’t have those breakdowns or we can’t lose the ball. … We’ve got to eliminate those 8-10 points where they were just breakdowns and giving up easy baskets.”

Marshalltown’s first lead came early in the third quarter, when a midrange jumper by Tre Brooks put the Bobcats on top 27-26. Southeast Polk countered with a 9-0 run, but MHS battled back once again. Sophomore Kyle Smith scored the Bobcats’ last nine points of the third period to put MHS up 41-39, but one of Grady Braunshweigh-Norris’s three-pointers put the Rams up 42-41 just before the buzzer.

Marshalltown simply didn’t get the ball into the basket enough in the final period of play and the Rams put it away.

“I thought our effort was really great tonight,” Appel said. “I thought we played extremely hard, I thought we executed well for the most part offensively and ran some good stuff. We missed some wide-open shots, some good shots for us, and we’ve just gotta knock ’em down.”

Brooks finished with a team-high 18 points for the Bobcats, while Kyle Smith scored 17 and Cory Smith 10. Rogelio Ceren sank a corner 3-pointer at the first-quarter horn, and Giannetto got a basket to fall in the fourth to get MHS within 53-50.

Braunshweigh-Norris countered with a 3-pointer and free throws finished off the Rams’ triumph.

Behind Goodman’s 17, Braunshweigh-Norris scored 15 points off the bench and Jaxen Barton added 12 points in the paint. Trey Lust got nine points inside for Southeast Polk, and A.J. Schaefer finished with six.

Southeast Polk 59, Marshalltown 50

SE POLK (6-16) — A.J. Schaefer 3 0-0 6, Bode Goodman 5 5-5 17, Sam Zelenovich 0 0-0 0, Jaxen Barton 5 2-3 12, Trey Lust 4 1-2 9, Zeb Hinze 0 0-0 0, Grady Braunshweigh-Norris 6 0-0 15, Noah Frank 0 0-0 0, Rex Smith 0 0-0 0. TOTALS 22 7-9 59.

MARSHALLTOWN (9-12) — Carter Giannetto 1 0-0 2, Tre Brooks 8 1-2 18, Kyle Smith 3 8-8 17, Cory Smith 5 0-0 10, Rogelio Ceren 1 0-0 3, Jacob Thiessen 0 0-0 0, Jacob Hayes 0 0-0 0. TOTALS 17 9-10 50.

SE POLK 14 12 16 17 — 59

MHS 9 14 18 9 — 50

3-Point Goals–SE Polk 5 (Braunshweigh-Norris 3, Goodman 2), MHS 5 (K. Smith 3, Brooks, Ceren). Team Fouls–SE Polk 11, MHS 12. Fouled Out–none.