Imagine your high school sports days. Now -- and this is BIG stretch for almost all of us –-imagine that you and your teammates have won the league championship and finished No. 1 every year.

Feeling any pressure?

Well, that kind of sums up the story for the St. Frances girls basketball team –- six-time defending champions in the Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland A Conference and the final No. 1 team the last three years.

Panthers junior forward Briana Hutchen laughed when asked if her team felt that pressure to stay on top.

"Who wouldn’t feel pressure in the No. 1 spot?” Hutchen said, but her comments show that she and her teammates have it all in pretty good perspective.

“We realize it’s not going to be easy and everything’s just not going to be handed to us always.”

The Panthers have handled the pressure exceptionally well so far with some on-court pressure of their own and a level of quickness that overwhelmed both No. 2 Arundel and No. 4 Western last week. The win over Arundel was a big one, but you got the sense that beating Western Saturday at the Breezy Bishop Showcase meant a little more to the Panthers because it was a showdown of teams from Baltimore City.

Said Hutchen: “Everyone’s out to beat you. Everyone wants to be where you are, so we have to play up to our level no matter who we’re playing and [Saturday night], it just happened to be Western and we had to prove to them that we’re the No. 1 team in Baltimore.”

-- Katherine Dunn