The night the lights went out in the Sacred Heart Prep gym

But that is precisely what happened early in the third quarter of Sacred Heart Prep’s boys’ basketball game against Oakland Tech in the quarterfinals of the CIF Northern California Division I playoff bracket Thursday night, a game the Gators were leading, 38-31.

“Definitely no playbook to any of this,” said SHP head coach Tony Martinelli.

Said Frank Rodriguez, SHP’s assistant principal of athletics: “It was one of the most stressful things in my time here. You have 300 people in the gym, waiting for you to make a decision.”

Ultimately, SHP turned to a rival. Rodriguez called his counterpart, Earl Koberlein, at Menlo School. The Lady Knights were a few minutes from wrapping up their 59-55 Division II quarterfinal win over Caruthers when Koberlein’s phone rang.

“I got a call from Frank Rodriguez, with about three minutes left in our game, asking if they could finish at our place,” Koberlein said. He said he became aware of the power outage at SHP when he received a text from one of the support staff who was traveling with the Menlo boys’ basketball team, who were in Chico to face Pleasant Valley.

“I had no idea,” Koberlein said.

When the Menlo athletic director found out SHP just needed the gym and the lights, Koberlein was more than willing to accommodate.

“Their PA announcer came over … their scoreboard operators came over, they have the same system,” Koberlein said. “It was fortunate we had a game (being played).

“A couple years ago, they helped us out with a Nor Cal game. It was nice to reciprocate.”

About an hour after the first electrical issue, the two teams were back on the floor, with the Gators holding off the Bulldogs 77-70 to advance to the Division I semifinals Saturday.

While all’s well that ends well, those first 15, 20 minutes were chaotic for all involved. Martinelli said his defense had just drawn a charge against Oakland Tech and was about to inbound the ball when half the lights in the gym — along with the lights on the scoreboard — went out.

“The first 20, 25 minutes, we were thinking it was something wrong in the gym itself. We’re looking at the breakers. We had never had power halfway on, halfway off,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said he was finally informed that residents in the neighborhood received messages on their phones from Pacific Gas and Electric that there was a power grid issue, a “brown out,” in Atherton.

At that point, Rodriguez called the California Interscholastic Federation, the organization in charge of the tournament. Rodriguez said it took about 15 more minutes to get in touch with CIF officials and when he did, he found out why: turns out, they were dealing with electrical issues at a pair of games in Oakland at the same time.

CIF told Rodriguez he needed to do everything he could do to finish the game. That’s when he reached out to Menlo.

After figuring out the logistics of moving the game to Menlo, in a video posted on Twitter, Rodriguez went to center court to explain the impending move down the street on Valparaiso Avenue.

At which point, the power went completely out, plunging the gym into complete blackness and eliciting reaction from those in attendance.

But in a matter of moments, the gym was bathed in the glow of scores of cellphone flashlights that served as emergency lighting to safely exit the gym.

“It was pitch black in there. Usually we have, at least, the scoreboard light [shining],” Martinelli said. “(The cellphone flashlights) lit it up enough to get to the exit.”

The power outage affected the game in other ways, as well. It took a while for the some of the parking areas to clear out because the electric gates that surround the school were inoperable.

“Losing our power kept our [parking] gates down. They had to manually figure out how to lift the gates,” Martinelli said.

Martinelli was also torn between being coach and, as an assistant athletic director, an administrator as well. He was grateful to know he had Rodriguez and longtime administrator and former coach, Lamont Quattlebaum, helping get the issue sorted out. It allowed Martinelli to focus on his team’s well-being.

“On the coaching side, you have to make sure the kids are OK,” Martinelli said. When he saw Rodriguez, Quattlebaum and other administrators jump into action, “that part settled me down. There were enough people working on it,” Martinelli continued. “We had the right people in the right places to make sure everything and everyone was safe and secure.”

When the game finally resumed, Martinelli said it quickly just became a playoff basketball game.

“In the end, it’s a basketball game. … The adrenaline all came back and the intensity was there,” Martinelli said. “The ‘win-or-go-home’ mentality, both teams had it. It just became a game after that.”