Photo courtesy of Mark Evans Warren beat Hickory 71-52 in last weekend’s District 10 Class 4A championship game at Edinboro University.

After a week to calm down and prepare, the Warren Dragons will amp it back up for a PIAA Class 4A first-round playoff game against North Catholic at 7 p.m. tonight at Joseph A. Massa Gymnasium.

Warren improved to 20-5 last Friday by winning the school’s fourth-ever D10 title and first in 41 years (1983). The Dragons first beat Corry 72-52 and Grove City 59-46, and finally Hickory 71-52 in the D10 4A championship game.

“We talked about this in practice that we weren’t going to talk again about winning a District 10 championship until after the season was over,” said Warren coach Jeff Berdine, “and then our goal needs to be one game at a time, play as well as we can each opportunity we get from here on out.”

That “one game at a time” is tonight against a team that’s won 11 of 15 games and averages 73 points per game.

After being bounced to the consolation round of the WPIAL tournament, the Trojans took down Knoch 69-52 on Friday to advance to the PIAA playoffs. North Catholic’s all-time leading scorer, Max Hurray, scored a game-high 23 points.

Seven teams from the WPIAL qualified for states, and North Catholic ultimately finished fifth in District 7 with a 74-61 win over South Allegheny in the fifth-sixth-place game. With more than 1,300 career points, Hurray added another 24 points to lead the Trojans (16-9) — a private school in a northern suburb of Pittsburgh.

“They are a very deep team,” said Berdine. “They play very fast and they are going to press the entire game. The tempo should be fun for us to play in and fun for people to watch.

“North Catholic does some things defensively that we haven’t seen a lot of this year, so we will need to play well to beat them, which at this point of the season is the case in any playoff game,” he added. “We will have to take care of the ball and make good decisions.”

That’s exactly what Warren did in a D10 championship game against Hickory in which they shot 67% from the field and 79% on 2-point field goal attempts. Warren committed seven turnovers in the game.

The Dragons were amped up for that game and will be amped up for a home game that Coach Berdine hopes is a standing-room-only crowd.

“Just like I told them before our last game, ‘leave nothing in the tank, play the game the way you have since you were eight years old, and enjoy every minute of it,'” said Berdine, who has over 300 career head coaching wins in 22 seasons. “‘Hopefully your community and your classmates will come out and support you in droves.'”