Disappointment doesn’t seem to last long for the Concordia boys basketball team, and maybe that’s the secret to their success.

There was a three-game losing streak in December that cost the Cadets the SAC tournament title and ultimately a regular-season conference championship.

A 67-54 defeat Dec. 17 to Bishop Luers wouldn’t come back and bite Concordia until the tiebreaker to determine the league champion last week. Then came a 68-57 loss as the No. 1 seed in the holiday tournament to No. 9 Wayne, followed by a 69-49 setback to Leo, the Cadets’ sectional semifinal opponent tonight at New Haven.

But after the loss to the Lions, Concordia (16-4) has won 12 straight including a 63-15 pummeling of Angola in the first round of the sectional Wednesday, and the Cadets really haven’t looked back. Not when Luers clinched its first SAC title Friday and the Cadets finished second because of their earlier loss to the Knights.

Their identical 7-1 league records didn’t matter because the SAC doesn’t have co-champions.

“We have just been building our confidence, and anything you are confident about you want to see the next challenge present itself,” Concordia coach Josh Eggold said. “The sectional provides that challenge. Luers did a great job winning the conference, and with the tiebreaker I understand the rules and how the conference works. The challenge that awaits us is pretty exciting. We have really welcomed those kinds of situations.”

So it starts over for the Class 3A No. 7 Cadets, who are looking to get their first sectional title in five years.

“That was behind us as of Friday night,” senior Kasey Oetting said of any disappointment of not winning the SAC. “Our team is just focused on looking forward to hopefully winning the sectional title and going from there game by game. We have really ignored what people have said, and we know what we are capable of doing.”

Concordia, which entered the season with low expectations from outsiders after going 11-12 last year, ascended to the top seed in the SAC tournament with a 3-0 start to the league season before hitting that rough patch. The Cadets have clearly rebounded.

“Winning 11 in a row at the end of the (regular) season puts a bull’s-eye on your back,” Eggold said. “One of the neat things about this group is I don’t know if that stuff matters a whole lot to them. After we found out Friday night that Luers had won (the SAC), and we couldn’t celebrate that SAC title, we just said it was onto the next challenge so let’s attack it and be ready to go.”