What, are we dreaming? Is this real? The Morton High School Lady Potters are one victory away from another state championship. Another. As in a second state championship. A second straight state championship. They embarrassed Morgan Park this afternoon, 54-39, and I know the perfect word for what’s happening here. It’s a whole bunch of letters and syllables, which I should avoid, but I’m going to type the word here and you can look it up or you can trust me that it’s the perfect word even though none of us have ever heard it said out loud. The word is phantasmagoria.

This is no dream, no wish, no hope. This is real. This is the Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, telling the press after a 54-39 victory over mighty Morgan Park, “We’re here to take another title.” What we’re seeing with Becker’s team are amazing events built on amazing events, each more extraordinary than the last. I covered a World Series once, Phillies and Astros, and one game went on forever, 14 innings or some such, and everything happened that could happen in a baseball game, and someone asked the Phillies’ relief pitcher Tug McGraw what it was like seeing all that. He said, “It was like riding a motorcycle through an art gallery.”

So it is with these Lady Potters.

Here’s a piece of the Potters’ art . . .

Little Kassidy Shurman, a 5-foot-2 sophomore, is in the game for a minute midway through the first quarter. She’s in only because Becker, didn’t like a Tenley Dowell mistake on defense. And what does the little squirt Shurman do when the ball comes to her deep in the right corner? She might do the safe thing and throw it back to somebody older and bigger. Instead, she does the right thing. Unguarded, she puts up a 3-point shot. It goes in. It puts Morton up, 11-3, and sends a message to the Chicago folks. We ain’t scared. Becker knows that of his girls: “They’re not intimidated by anybody, whether it’s their record, or their height, or their athleticism.”
Another piece of art . . .

Jadison Wharram is on fire. The senior forward has made four straight baskets in under three minutes to move Morton from a 12-all tie to a 20-16 lead late in the second quarter. But that’s not the prettiest part. That, she creates with 2:11 to play in the half. From a step behind the free throw line, Wharram rises for a jump shot. She has already made her first five mid-range jumpers and a layup, 6-for-6. As her 17-footer floats toward the basket, Wharram floats away, half-turning to start back on defense because she is fairly certain, now floating on a shooter’s high, that she soon will be 7-for-7. “When I let it go,” she said later, “I thought, ‘That feels good.’” It was good, Steph Curry-good. Morton led, 22-16, and Morgan Park never came closer.

It’s not so much that the Potters beat Morgan Park and now will play Chicago North Lawndale for the title Saturday afternoon. It’s the way they did it.

Here was Morgan Park, out of Chicago, a powerhouse in the city of big shoulders, a winner 30 times in 33 games, a tall, fast, jump-out-of-the-building team with two Division-1 signees, a team runnin’ and gunnin’ to 66 points a game, once getting 104, never fewer than 47. And what did the Lady Potters do?

The little team from the pumpkin patches of downstate Illinois won by double figures. But even that is not it. To say the Potters beat Morgan Park is to understate it. Morgan Park never had a chance. Up by eight at halftime, the Potters won the third quarter, 10-2, and led, 34-18. By game’s end – really, long before that – the Chicagoans had been reduced to a scratching, clawing mess.

Another piece of Potters’ art . . .

Tenley Dowell, a freshman, has the ball, late in the game, dribbling away from Morgan Park’s star, Deja Cage, a Division-1 quality player already committed to Loyola University. Her team’s leading scorer all season, Cage played this day on a sprained ankle, ineffective from the start. And now she is chasing after Morton’s rookie, desperate to keep up so she could foul her. Finally, exhausted, the big star reaches out and grabs a chunk of jersey. Dowell makes two free throws. It’s 50-34.

The master artist in all the Potters’ works was the coach, Becker. At his team’s last full-speed practice Wednesday afternoon, he told the players how the Morgan Park game would go. In every aspect, he was dead-on . . . .

“They won’t guard us for more than two passes, and I guarantee you that.”

“We can take advantage of them with back cuts and drives to the hoop.”

“They won’t box out on rebounds. They’ll try to out-athlete us.”

“Offensively, we will attack the paint and we will be patient.”

“Defensively, we’re not built to deny them everything. But we will deny them the paint. We’ll take our chances with them shooting 3’s. I’m not saying they won’t light it up. But I’ve been to Redbird many times and I’ve seen shooting percentages go down. I hope they make their first two or three. We’ll stay the course. Then hope they go 3 for 24 and we get 90, 95 percent of the rebounds. That would be lovely.”
“We have to be good fundamentally.”

He wanted the Potters to do the little things perfectly, such as back-cut passes to people slashing from the side – as done by Kayla McCormick to Dowell, as done by Caylie Jones to Wharram. He also wanted the Potters to do the seemingly simplest thing perfectly. Catch a pass the right way. Come to it, catch it, rip it to a secure spot against your side, face the defender, and “let the dust settle,” meaning see what’s happening around you before making another move.

I am here to tell you that as the Potters left Morgan Park in a puddle of despair, I, the veteran sportswriter, did something I’ve never done before. On every pass in the fourth quarter, I watched how the Potters caught the ball. I swear that every time – not most of the time, every time – they did catch/rip/face/let the dust settle.

They shot 48 percent from the field to Morgan Park’s 32.6. They matched the bigger, more athletic team in rebounds, 22 apiece. The losers didn’t go 3-for-24 on 3’s but they were 7-for-19 and 4 of the 7 came too late to be meaningful.

Meanwhile, being patient while attacking, Morton committed only 7 turnovers against the losers’ pressing defense and forced them into 26 fouls. The Potters made 28 of 35 free throws to Morgan Park’s 2 of 2. Brandi Bisping went 19 for 21 at the line, making 12 straight in the fourth quarter when all of Morton’s 20 points came on free throws. A curious note: In the fourth quarters of last year’s two Final Four games and this one, Morton has made one field goal – one – and 51 free throws. Becker said, “We’re very good with a lead. They can’t guard you at the free throw line.”

And now what?

A year ago, assistant coach Bill Davis set the road-to-a-state-championship tone with a locker room speech in January during which he said, “Now you have to finish it.”

Now the Potters play another Chicago team, North Lawndale Prep.

Sound familiar?

In December’s State Farm Holiday Classic, North Lawndale made three improbable 3-point shots, two of them at the buzzer, to keep alive a four-overtime game in which it eventually beat Morton, 48-46.

“They’re one of the three teams to beat us this season,” Bisping said. “And that’s not going to happen again.”

Good.