HOLLYWOOD — Homecoming brought the biggest crowd of the season to the Hollywood High field on Friday, a court in sashes at halftime, a band that mostly stayed together, and a couple hundred alumni who came back to watch the Sheiks lose a game they spent the fourth quarter nearly stealing.

The visitors were the better team for three quarters, bigger along both lines and more sure of what they were doing, and they built a two-score lead by grinding out the clock in a way the young Sheiks could not answer. By the middle of the third quarter the home stands had settled into the flat mood of a crowd that has done the arithmetic.

Then the sophomore quarterback, the same one who rallied the team in September’s opener, found something. Hollywood scored twice in the final period, the second on a scramble that had the alumni along the fence up and shouting, and pulled within a single possession with a few minutes to play. An onside kick nearly worked. A last drive reached midfield before it stalled on a fourth down that came up a yard short.

“I’m not going to stand here upset about that fourth quarter,” said Marcus Trejo, the Sheiks’ head coach, in his second season. “Three weeks ago these kids would have folded when it got to two scores. Tonight they made a good team sweat in front of their families. That’s growth you can’t schedule.”

The loss drops Hollywood below .500 as the schedule turns toward league play, where the games start counting toward a playoff seed. Trejo has said all fall that he wanted his young roster tested early, and the homecoming opponent, a program with a winning tradition and a deeper bench, delivered the test. What the coach seemed to want the crowd to notice was not the margin but the trend: a team that started slow in September and is learning to finish.

For the alumni, the result mattered less than the ritual. Ozzie Kaufman, who graduated in 1979 and has missed few homecomings since, watched from his usual spot near the fence and said the game reminded him of the teams he played on, undersized and stubborn. “We lost plenty of these,” he said. “You still came back the next year. That’s what the whole thing is about — showing up, win or lose, because it’s yours.”

The homecoming court took its bows at the half, a tradition older than anyone in the bleachers could date exactly, and the game resumed to a field that had briefly belonged to the students in sashes. A parent selling waters behind the stands said she had run out by the third quarter, the biggest night of the season for her small booster stand.

The Sheiks travel next week to open league play, and Trejo, asked whether the near-miss would carry over, said only that his players had learned they could hang with anyone for a quarter. The trick now, he added, is learning to do it for four.