Newtown High School’s boys’ basketball team lost back-to-back games for the first time this season, falling 55-46 to visiting Masuk of Monroe on February 13, and 54-49 at Pomperaug of Southbury on February 17.

The Nighthawks fell to 7-4 in South-West Conference play and, with just two regular season games remaining, find themselves clinging to the third seed in the standings. The top four squads will earn quarterfinal-round home games when the playoffs begin at 7 pm on February 27.

Good news for the Nighthawks is that they control their own destiny. The potentially bad news is that the teams remaining on the slate — Weston, which will visit NHS on Friday, February 20, and Stratford, which will host Newtown on February 24 (both at 7 pm) — stand to be hungry. They are among the many teams in the mix trying to get into the top eight that qualify for SWC tourney play. Weston carried a 4-6 mark into the middle of the week, with three games left; and Stratford was 5-5, also with three games to go, beginning with the Thursday, February 19 scheduled clash with Weston. Behind NHS are nine teams with four, five, or six wins and seven of them have enough games remaining to match or surpass Newtown’s win total.

“Everybody is jockeying for position,” Newtown Coach Tim Tallcouch said.

Masuk, now 6-5, is one of those contending teams. Tallcouch believes his team may have been too confident about having won seven of nine SWC contests when it faced then 5-4 Masuk.

“For us, we cannot rest on the fact that we’re 7-2 coming in,” the coach said.

Will Dalton had 16 points, Harry Depuy scored 14, Mason Melillo dropped in six, Jacob Burden and Jeremy Doski each had four, and Charlie Huegi added two in the loss to Masuk. Depuy blocked eight shots and pulled down six rebounds, Doski had eight rebounds, and Depuy had seven rebounds.

“We’re really going to find out what we’re made of the next three games we have left,” Tallcouch said of the Pomperaug, Weston, and Stratford games.

The Nighthawks didn’t get the job done in the first of those three tests. Pomperaug improved to 6-5 in SWC play despite 13 points from Doski and 11 from Dalton. But they’ve got two more games with a chance to lock up the third or fourth seed on their own terms. Newtown shares a 7-4 conference mark with Barlow, but holds the better seed and tiebreaker advantage, having beaten Barlow. The Nighthawks have already beaten Notre Dame-Fairfield which, with nine wins, has the second best conference mark behind 10-1 Bunnell of Stratford. Newtown holds a tiebreaker advantage over 5-6 Bethel, but 6-5 Immaculate of Danbury has a tiebreaker edge on the Hawks. With so much parity in the conference, a lot is unsettled with the season winding down. The picture will be clear by the middle of next week. Stay tuned, and visit swc-ct.com for complete standings and updates.