Talk about happy faces, look at Jacey Wharram’s. She’s running off the court. She’s smiling and she’s laughing and she’s aglow. I shouldn’t ask ou look up a word. But look up a word. Look up “incandescent.” Jacey Wharram, incandescent, is sprinting toward the Lady Potters’ bench, and she’s flying past her teammates, slapping hands in celebration, and she hears Brandi Bisping.

Bisping is shouting. “Dude, you got 19 rebounds!”

Hardly slowing down, Wharram is shouting. “How MANY?!?”

BB: “Nineteen!”

JW: “Don’t be lying to me!”

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so I asked her father, once a college player, when he last had 19 rebounds in a game.

“Never happened,” Jed Wharram says.

And then I asked her mother, once a college player, when she last had 19 rebounds.

“Maybe if you add up two or three games,” Julie Wharram says.

The other Wharram girl, Jadison, the combative soul of the Lady Potters’ state championship teams the last two seasons, is home from college on Christmas break. Two rows up in the bleachers at Pekin High School, she waits to see her kid sister come out of the locker room. And then Jadison bends down to wrap a big ol’ hug around Jacey’s neck.

Yes, the Lady Potters had themselves some fun tonight. They whipped up on Pekin the way they’ve whipped up most everybody. The score was 70-34. The undefeated Potters have won 10 straight this season and 23 in a row reaching back into last season’s state title run. They scored 70 for the first time in their last 34 games. And still no one this season has scored more than 40 against them. The Potters’ average margin of victory is now more than 25 points, 56.7-31.4.

It’s not true that Jacey Wharram, a 5-foot-11 senior, got every rebound for the Potters. It just seemed true. As with all good rebounders, on this night she established inside position and kept it until, inevitably, the ball came to her. The 19 rebounds – the other Potters had 13 – were the team’s individual high across the last five seasons, two more than Bisping had on Jan. 17, 2015. In addition, Wharram scored 12 points. She achieved the double-double the rebounders’ way: three put-back buckets and six straight free throws.

As to how Wharram got all those rebounds, she said, “I guess nobody boxed me out.” No, no, too modest by half. Pekin’s failings may have had a little to do with Wharram’s big night. More likely, her 19 can be accounted for by citing a rebounder’s greatest asset – as when Wharram mentioned a rare rebound that slipped away. “In my heart,” she said, “I got them all.”

Again, as in the Potters’ nine previous games, this one wasn’t much. Morton is eight-players deep when its Mid-Illini Conference opponents are happy to be two-deep. It was close for a while in the first quarter. But the Potters then went on a 29-5 run that brought them from 13-11 down to 40-18 up midway in the third quarter. In that run, Wharram scored 8 points and Kassidy Shurman 6 while Bisping, Tenley Dowell and Josi Becker all had 5.

Oddly, that game-deciding run began with a technical foul call that I, for one, had never seen before – and it turned out to be a mistake. This takes some explaining.

Because the Potters often substitute two or three players at a time, it’s possible to wind up with too many players, or too few, on the court. At 2:53 of the first quarter, Morton’s coach, Bob Becker, sent in two subs. But three players came out. That left the Potters with four players on the court against Pekin’s five.

When Becker realized the mistake, he told Dowell to get back on the court. As soon as she jumped back into play, near midcourt, not even close to anything going on, a referee at the far end saw her and called a technical foul on Morton.

Becker argued that he had the right to send out a fifth player.

The referee said no, no, “She can’t just walk in the game.”

Becker said, “Show me the rule.”

Well. Put a man in zebra stripes, he don’t need no silly rulebook, he can make it up as he goes. So the zebra man gave Pekin two free throws and the ball. The free throws put Pekin ahead, 13-11. Coincidence, karma, whatever – that’s when the Potters began that 29-5 avalanche that buried Pekin.

And lookie here. Look at the rulebook. “10.2.4 SITUATION B” says that a coach who finds his team with four players on the court can order a fifth into play. “RULING: No technical foul is charged to A5 (the fifth player). A5’s return to the court was not deceitful, nor did it provide A5 an unfair positioning advantage on the court.”

Of course, some people already believe Morton has “an unfair positioning advantage” in that it has really good players playing really well and maybe it would be a good idea if the Mid-Illini passed a rule saying the Potters MUST play with four players instead of five to give other teams a chance.

Until then, the Potters will continue to play at a high level at both ends of the court. With 10 more 3-pointers tonight – by five different players – Morton has made 78 3’s this season – meaning it is averaging 23.4 points a game on 3’s. Defensively, look at these numbers: The Potters have played 40 quarters. They have held opponents to fewer than 10 points in 24 quarters, giving up an average of only 5.5 points in those hope-killing, spirit-killing, game-deciding quarters. Pekin, for instance, scored three points in the second quarter tonight and six in the third as they fell 30 points behind.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring tonight with 14. Josi Becker had 13, Wharram 12, Bisping 11, Lindsey Dullard 8, Shurman 6, Caylie Jones 4, and Courtney Jones 2.