Luke Panttaja’s rest lasted about as long as a Usain Bolt race. Century’s senior point guard was in the middle of a scoring deluge, helping his club create some meaningful separation from Highland in Friday’s third quarter, and he needed a quick breather. So he came jogging over to the bench.

If you turned your head, if you checked your phone, heck, if you even shared a few words with the person next to you, you might have missed what happened next: Panttaja checked right back into the game. He took a few sips of water, rested his legs for a moment, then headed right back to the scorer’s table, ready to return and try to help his Diamondbacks fend off the 5A Rams.

“It’s, hey, you’re gonna get a drink of water, and then we’ll talk to you for one second,” Century coach Ryan Frost said, “and you’ll get your butt back in there as soon as possible.”

Panttaja and the Diamondbacks owned an eight-point lead around the four-minute mark of the fourth quarter, but they lost too many turnovers and produced too many empty trips to hold on to the lead, watching it evaporate like mist in a 54-51 overtime loss. In the fourth frame and the extra session, they coughed up five turnovers combined. Panttaja unleashed every bullet he had, torching Highland’s defense for 30 points on five 3-pointers, and he kept his rest to a minimum — but none of it was enough to win.

“A lot of times,” Frost said, “we’ll go as far as Luke takes us.”

Good luck finding a better way to capture what has become of this Century season so far. For the 2-6 Diamondbacks, scenes have changed so much it’s like someone changed the wallpaper on their season: Gone are the days of five-star prospect Isiah Harwell, who has since transferred to Wasatch Academy in Utah, and Century has also bid farewell to a cadre of seniors who engineered much of last season’s success, pieces like bruiser Bruin Fleischmann and reliable 3-and-D wing Jordan Lee and inside force Nash Harding.

In their places, well, it’s mostly two returners: Panttaja and Elias Blackhawk, a junior guard who also played significant minutes on last season’s team. They’re the players in charge of shepherding the rest of the roster, an inexperienced and young bunch. We’re talking players like junior forward Sam Billings, junior guard Spencer Payne, junior center Kevin Adamson, senior guard Richie Bull. They’re all upperclassmen. They just haven’t played real varsity minutes.

For Frost, that’s the challenge of this winter: How do you regroup after the loss of a legit five-star prospect, a guy whose list of offers includes blue bloods Kansas and Duke? How do you get the most out of your two returners? How do you bring the rest of the guys along? The answers are about as easy to solve as the pythagorean theorem. But Frost is the one holding the pencil.

“I mean, having a five-star player like Isiah changes a lot,” Frost said. “Luke has 30 tonight. Imagine if there’s another kid that can score 20 easily, then Luke’s way more open, and so is Elias, and so is the next guy down the line. The gravity that he pulls on a basketball court is immense. There’s a lot of stats you don’t see with a guy like that, because he draws so much defensive attention. So that means everyone’s shots they get are just better than they would normally get. It’s a wide-open 3 versus maybe a tough 3.”

If you stopped right now and Googled “hardest things in the world to do,” you probably wouldn’t find “Replacing Isiah Harwell” — but you probably should. Harwell is a 6-foot-5 freak of nature, a kid who scores and rebounds and defends with such staggering ease that last year, when he played at Century, the most common question about him was this: How on earth is this guy a freshman?

But this summer, with help from his family, Harwell decided to transfer to Wasatch Academy, a boarding school with a stage that has helped Harwell rack up a dozen Power 5 offers so far. For his part, Frost harbors no hard feelings — “it’s about what’s best for kids,” he said.

The interesting part about this Century team is this: Frost is now asking Pantajja to be Harwell. Not in the talent sense — in the role sense. On last year’s team, Pantajja became most effective as a catch-and-shoot marksman, hauling in passes from Harwell and turning them into a bomb from the perimeter. Rarely did he handle the ball. Even more seldom did he create for himself.

Except now that’s how Pantajja has to operate. In truth, that’s when these Diamondbacks are at their best, when Pantajja has the ball in his hands, using a screen to find room for a triple or leveraging that threat against defenders, taking them all the way to the basket. Otherwise, their offense tends to bog down, and turnovers surface in spades.

“He’s a lefty, and there’s not a lot of lefties out there,” Highland coach Matt Stucki said. “So it’s an adjustment just because of him being a left-hander. He did a really good job of coming off that pick and hesitating and rising up to shoot the jumper.”

“I think I’ve definitely improved. It’s a different game,” Panttaja said. “Trying to find your shot off the dribble versus being a shooting guard, just standing there just trying to get a bucket.”

Watch Panttaja play and you notice a few changes in his game. The most obvious is his handle. He isn’t pulling out devastating crossovers, and he isn’t exactly sending defenders to the ground with slick moves, but he’s clearly much more comfortable putting it on the floor and creating for himself — which is a step forward for a guy whose role was so different just nine months ago. Other changes are more subtle. Frost likes Panttaja’s improvements in the weight room. “So the varsity game’s not as physical,” Frost said. “You can take that bump a little bit more.”

The Diamondbacks have taken plenty of bumps thus far. They opened with two wins, beating 5A clubs Thunder Ridge and Timberline, before suffering six straight losses, which is the streak they’re currently trying to end. They’ve kept some losses close. Others have gotten away from them. What they’ve usually been able to count on is Panttaja, their lanky 6-foot guard who has found ways to change his game as his team has changed.

He’s become a better ball handler. He’s working on his vocal leadership. He’s even gotten better at hydrating quickly.

“I guarantee over the Christmas break, he’s gonna find a gym,” Frost said, “and we’ll probably open it up for him a couple times, and he’s gonna get more shots up, and he’s gonna get in better shape. So it’s nice to have a kid that’s that good, and he’s still hungry.”