The sense of first-half déjà vu was palpable.

Throughout the first 30 minutes at Hershey High School, the Donegal Indians were all over the ball, keeping play deep in their offensive zone. They had penalty corners. They had shots. They had power.

What they didn't have in Saturday's PIAA Class AA quarterfinal game against Indian Valley were any goals to show for their prodigious efforts. Exactly like their opening-round game at the same field the previous Tuesday.

On the Indians' sideline, Coach Jessica Shellenberger even compared the situation to the movie "Groundhog Day."

Then, the second half began and the script changed.

As with Tuesday's game, about two minutes into the half, Donegal broke the ice with its first goal, this time as freshman Karlee Farr fed classmate Sammi Yoder in the circle.

"It was just a good pass from my teammate," Yoder said. "It was just on the goal line and the goalie was off."

But then, unlike Tuesday, the floodgates opened.

And by the end of the contest, instead of the sometimes-rocky 2-0 win they notched Tuesday, the Indians had engineered an utterly dominating 5-1 performance. With the win, they earned a place in team history, becoming the first Donegal squad to secure a PIAA semifinal berth.

Up next for the Indians will be Selinsgrove, a 2-1 overtime winner over Archbishop Carroll in Saturday's first game. That contest will be played Tuesday.

"We talked about it," Shellenberger said of the similarities in her team's performance. "We talked about changing fate a little bit, getting out and getting after it right away. But when you've got (underclassmen) on the field, whether you think they're over it or not at any point in the season, they're still freshmen and sophomores that you're asking so much of. … They still can get anxious in the first half, and it takes them a while to settle down."

Once Farr and Yoder teamed up to put the Indians on the board, Donegal was indeed able to settle down and draw a breath of relief. But there was no relaxation to be found in the Indians' gameplan.

Instead of falling back into a defensive mode, they ratcheted up the offensive heat even more, maintaining constant pressure on the Indian Valley cage. Consequently, over the next 13 minutes, the Indians added three more goals.

Junior playmaker Laura Gebhart notched goals two of those, both unassisted. She drove for her first with 24:22 left, then notched the second with 19:42 to go, picking up her own rebound in the circle and poking it past Warriors goalie Paige Johnson.

The next goal came not long after, with 15:41 to play, as Mary Lynam took a pass from Kirsten Gochnauer and blasted a shot from the outer edge of the circle to beat Johnson to her right.

"When you're playing a team that's swinging at you, they're going to get lucky if you don't keep tight possession," Shellenberger said. "On our corners, we carried in and looked to dish more, and that's what generated a lot more corners rather than just straight-up shooting it in. … I said to them, 'Just carry it in. If you have a teammate open, pass it; if you have a shot, shoot; if you don't, get another corner.' I think they responded better to that and our execution improved."

Overall, the Indians collected 17 penalty corners and took a whopping 20 shots while holding the Warriors to seven shots and seven corners, mostly late in the game. They got their lone goal on a Brittany Mathews shot with just 18 seconds left.

Gochnauer had already closed out the Indians' scoring, picking up an unassisted goal off a rebound with just under 10 minutes left in the game.