“Another scary night and the Potters move into semis”

If it goes in, it’s overtime. It it doesn’t, the Morton High School Lady Potters win. Thing is, the ball hangs in the air. A 3-pointer from the left corner by a good shooter and the ball hits the far side of the rim. Great, it’s no good. But wait. The cursed ball bounces straight up. It might still fall in. The buzzer sounds, the backboard lights up red, game over. No. Wait. Not yet. The ratzenfratzin’ ball is high in the air, seemingly directly over the basket. It’s easy, if painful, to imagine the ball coming straight down and denying the Potters a victory they had earned tonight by coming from behind in the game’s last two minutes.

“It was an awesomely designed play,” the Morton coach, Bob Becker, said. “They got the ball to their best spot-up shooter. Then, oh, my goodness.”

About an hour later, give or take a few oh-my-goodness minutes, the ball descended on the far side of the basket.

Morton 35, Wheaton Warrenville South 32.

The victory moved the undefeated Potters, 13-0, to the semifinals of the State Farm Holiday Classic where they will play undefeated U High, 11-0, at 8:30 tomorrow night. You know the Potters’ numbers by now: 26 straight victories reaching back to last season’s state-championship run and 79 victories in their last 85 games. As good as those numbers are, Becker may like a smaller number more: 2-0. On back-to-back nights his team is 2-0 against good teams, winning by three points each night without all-stater Brandi Bisping, who is at home resting in recovery from mononucleosis. With a sigh, Becker said, “We’ve been tested.”

Let’s go to the videotape of tonight’s test. Let’s go first to the Potters’ littlest big girl, Kassidy Shurman. After opening the season with about umpteen consecutive missed 3-point shots, the 5-foot-2 ½ guard made four tonight just as she had made four the night before, causing Becker to say, “Kass is on fire. Even through that 0-for-18 or whatever, we’ve never taken the green light away from her.” Shurman’s two biggest 3’s tonight came in the opening minutes of the fourth quarter. They broke a 23-all tie and put Morton up, 29-23.

Let’s go now to the game’s last two and a half minutes. Whatever bad happened earlier – such as the Potters going scoreless for nearly 13 ½ minutes, including the full second quarter against an impenetrable 1-2-2 zone – was long forgotten in the heroics of crunch time.

With 2:20 to play, Wheaton Warrenville led, 32-29 before Tenley Dowell scored Morton’s first basket in the three minutes since Shurman’s second 3.

At 2:03, Josi Becker stole a pass and sprinted in for a layup – only to miss the shot. Worse, teammate Lindsey Dullard fouled on the rebound.

Remember those names, Becker and Dullard. The last two minutes of a basketball game are filled with opportunity for redemption. Players who find ways to redeem their mistakes are winners. Becker and Dullard will find ways.

First, Wheaton Warrenville missed the front end of its bonus opportunity on the Dullard foul. That gave Morton the ball with under two minutes to play. Against that formidable zone, Dullard moved without the ball from side to side on the baseline. One of the Potters noticed Dullard wide open under the basket. “I saw her, but the ball was on the other side,” Courtney Jones said.

Dullard is a freshman. So is Jones, who has played a dozen games of varsity basketball, usually the third girl in off the bench. And in the last minutes of a tight game, one freshman noticed another freshman wide open under the hoop and made a decision.

“When I got the ball,” Jones said, “I looked to see if Lindsey was there.”

Yes, she was. And Jones threw a strike to Dullard.

“Lindsey kind of bobbled it,” Jones said. “But I knew she’d make it.”

At 1:34, Dullard dropped in the layup. Morton led, 33-32.

At :20, Wheaton Warrenville made a mistake of the kind that separates winners from losers. It allowed a ball-handler to get trapped in a corner, surrounded by three Potters, one of them Josi Becker. When the ball-handler tried a desperate pass to escape trouble, Becker intercepted it. Again, as earlier, she sprinted downcourt. But this time she did the smart thing, stopping, backing away from pressure, killing time in those last game-deciding seconds.

Two pieces of drama were to come. At :09.7, Dowell was fouled. She had made four straight free throws in the third quarter, but they had come much earlier without the game on the line. After she made the first to raise Morton’s lead to 34-32, Wheaton Warrenville called timeout, perhaps thinking to jangle Dowell’s nerves.

But the sophomore has been there, done that. Last season, with a sectional victory to be taken, Dowell made two free throws and later confessed that, on a nervous scale of 1-10, she was “I think a 7.” Now faced with the timeout and a second free throw, an odd thing happened.

As she came to the line, referee J.D. Coleman told her, “Number 10 is shooting.”

Dowell is number 1. She said, “No, it’s me.”

The referee laughed and flipped her the ball. “Just kidding,” he said.

Dowell smiled and then made the second free throw for a 35-32 lead. As a measure of a sophomore’s increased confidence under pressure, she said her nervous number this time was smaller. “A 4,” she said, “maybe 5.”

Up by 3, Morton had the game won – unless someone went crazy and threw in a 3-pointer at the buzzer. That wouldn’t happen. Would it? That shot wouldn’t hit the rim, fly above the backboard, and come straight back down. Would it?

Never a doubt.

Dowell led Morton with 14 points, Shurman had 12, Dullard 7, and Caylie Jones 2.