Three days prior, Sargent and wife Allison, both Stafford County elementary school physical education teachers, had lost a newborn daughter. The coach had been away from his team during that troubled time and returned to guide the Wildcats that night against Stafford only at his wife’s urging.

Defaulting into “Coach Ben” mode and working with other people’s daughters might help take his mind off the loss of his own, at least for a couple of hours.

The teams and spectators mourned the 14-hour life of Eleanor Renee Sargent during a moment of silence before a game that the coach acknowledged later he was not sure he was going to be able to get through given his emotional state.

“It became real,” senior guard Laquetta Hairston said of hearing the baby’s name announced to a hushed gymnasium. “It really touched everybody. We appreciate life so much more. That’s what we’re dedicating our season to now, that family.”

Said Sargent through blinking eyes after the game: “At least we got to spend a little time with her before we had to let her go. The moment of silence before the game meant a lot to me, just to have her recognized that she was part of us.”

The ordeal started on the bench during a game the previous Friday, when Sargent kept stealing glances into the bleachers looking for Allison. She never showed up at the game after a doctor’s appointment to determine the cause of the swelling in her legs and feet. Family members told Sargent after the game that she had been hospitalized.

Not due until April, the baby had to be delivered immediately because of fluid buildup around organs, perhaps because of a virus, which restricted the flow of oxygen and also threatened to endanger Allison.

Eleanor died at Children’s Hospital that Saturday night. As of Thursday, Sargent still had not removed his hospital bracelet, refusing to surrender to the finality of it all. The ID scraped against his dry-erase board during timeouts.

In understated fashion, Sargent addressed his family situation with his players before the game by referencing the adversity and telling them that how you handle it indicates a lot about what kind of person you are. He said he was going to lean on them to help pull him and his family through.

“When he mentioned that, it hit most of us hard, like almost we were in tears talking about it,” junior guard Chelsea Keyser said. “Most of us cried after the game. I know I did.”

The Wildcats, who frequently visit the Sargent home, usually for meals and their coach’s chocolate chip cookies, knew this wasn’t down-eight-with-three-minutes-to-play adversity. This wasn’t star-player-in-foul-trouble adversity. This was about as real as it gets.

Janelle, 5, and Lucy, 2, would not be welcoming the sister they had been giddily anticipating. That hit Sargent’s 13 honorary daughters hard.

“He’s loving,” said Hairston, the only returning starter on a team that surprisingly stitched together a 19-win season. “To us, he’s like a second father. For him to lose a kid, that’s so much love that he can’t give out.”

Mountain View rallied during that Valentine’s Day game but lost to Stafford. The Wildcats won a consolation game two days later to earn a Northwest Region tournament berth. They fell Saturday night at Battlefield in a first-round game, ending their season.

No matter how many playoff wins they had been able to reel off, the Wildcats would have associated their 2011-12 postseason with a sense of loss. That of their coach’s newborn baby, and a piece of their own waning childhoods.

Varsity Letter is a column about high school sports in the Washington area. E-mail Preston Williams at williamsp@washpost.com.