MILL CREEK — Shorewood will have to postpone its first trip to the state championships for at least one more season.

Mountlake Terrace ousted the Thunderbirds from the Northwest District 4A boys basketball playoffs Wednesday night with a convincing 77-58 victory at Jackson High School.

It was just the third double-digit loss of the year for the T-birds, who ended the season 14-9 overall.

The Hawks (15-8) will face Jackson — a 64-50 winner over Mariner in Wednesday’s other consolation semifinal — at 3 p.m. tomorrow at Jackson for a shot at the district’s third and final state berth.

“Tonight we didn’t have a whole lot of patience on the offensive end,” Shorewood coach Jeff Denny said. “We got in too much of a running game with them. We didn’t make the best decisions on offense.”

The Western Conference 4A South Division rivals ended the regular season with matching 11-7 league records, but the T-birds claimed the division’s No. 2 seed to districts by virtue of a coin flip.

Shorewood and Terrace split their season series, with each team winning narrowly on the road by two points. Their third meeting started out in much the same fashion until the Hawks pulled away in the final two minutes of the first half.

An 11-0 run turned Terrace’s two-point edge into a 41-28 halftime advantage. The T-birds went without a field goal over the final 3:30 of the first half and the first 2:30 of the third period.

Ryan Strieby scored eight unanswered points for Terrace as part of a 10-0 spurt midway through the third quarter, sandwiching two free throws between a pair of 3-pointers from the same corner.

The 6-foot-6 senior post led five Hawks in double figures with 18 points. Luke Hammond scored 13, Sean Gearin had 12, Ronald Steil-Williams chipped in 11 off the bench Mike Boxley had 10.

Gearin nailed a pullup jumper with 3:37 left in the third quarter to give the Hawks their largest lead at 58-34. In the fourth quarter, the T-birds never got closer than 14.

Terrace shot 60 percent (18-for-30) from the field in the second and third quarters combined, compared to Shorewood’s 33 percent (7-for-21) showing.

Rob Diederichs scored 11 of his game-high 26 points in the first quarter, hitting his first five shots for the T-birds. Shorewood led by as many as six in the first five minutes but saw its edge disappear for good less than two minutes into the second quarter.

The Hawks limited Diederichs to four second-quarter points.

“They sent a guard in from the backside and doubled him,” Denny said. “That made it real difficult for us to get him the ball.”

Sean Tracey finished with 16 points and no other T-birds had more than six.

“We wanted to push the ball and make it an up-tempo basketball game,” said Terrace coach Nalin Sood. “We can’t just let their big guys … catch the ball and turn and make power moves. They’re getting so good, they’re shooting outside too.”

With just three seniors on their roster, the T-birds fielded by far the youngest lineup at the eight-team district tournament.

Shorewood’s top two scorers this season — Diederichs and Tracey — were sophomores. And the starting five was rounded out by a trio of juniors.

“This is a great stepping stone going into next season,” Denny said. “Next year we’re going to have some experience over the teams that didn’t make it this far. Now the guys know what it’s going to take to get to where they want to go next year — and that’s the Tacoma Dome.”