Wait, the third girl from the end? Walking with the Morton High School Lady Potters toward the locker room. Is that Brandi Bisping? She’s supposed to be home, resting in recovery from mononucleosis. I catch a glimpse before the girl disappears into the shadows. I ask the Potters’ assistant coach, Brooke Bisping, “Did I just see your sister here?” We’re at Illinois Wesleyan University’s basketball arena where the Potters would play for the State Farm Holiday Classic championship.

“Yes,” Brooke says.

“She’s supposed to be in bed,” I say.

Brooke laughs. “We told her she could come under two rules: No yelling and no hugging.”

Five seconds into the game, Brandi Bisping is yelling.

“Let’s go, red!” she yells, red being the Potters’ uniform color on this night against Rock Island.

She’s yelling from the bench because she’s there as a civilian, wearing team warmups, having made a plea deal with her father for a one-night pardon from the couch at home. She wanted to come to the tournament’s first game. He said no. The second. No. And no to the third. “Then I told him if the team got to the championship game, I was going to go,” she said. “He said, ‘Agreeable.’”

Alas, it was a largely disagreeable game Friday night. Rock Island won, 60-40. So ended the Potters’ 14-game undefeated streak this season and their 27-game winning streak reaching into last season’s state championship run. Twenty-point defeats are decisive but they are dispiriting only if the losers never had a chance. Morton, a Class 3A school, had its chances against a big, strong, quick, once-beaten team at the top of the state’s Class 4A ratings.

Midway through the fourth quarter, Morton had reduced a Rock Island 14-point lead to nine at 47-38. By then, as in the tournament’s first three games, the full measure of Bisping’s absence was evident. Where the all-state senior excels – rebounding with bear-trap hands, scoring on power moves at the rim – the Potters failed too often. Such failures were not necessarily fatal had bounces gone Morton’s way. But this night, when a ball on the rim might have decided to fall into the net, it fell the other way. Too many times under the boards, with the ball there for the taking, Morton’s fingertips allowed it to fall into Rock Island’s hands.

The Potters’ Kassidy Shurman cut Rock Island’s lead to 47-38 with her third 3-pointer of the game. The clock showed 4:55 to play, not much time but time enough if, suddenly, a team can do well what it had done poorly all night. Instead, Morton’s defense gave up five quick points on plays that bedeviled them in their first three tournament games, each won by three points.

Fouled taking down an offensive rebound, Rock Island first made a free throw. Then it scored on a layup, a girl dribbling across the paint, low, curling through Morton’s interior defense. Finally, a Rock Island guard drove from the top of the arc, twice taking the ball between her legs on a zig-zag sprint to the hoop that no Potter could stop.

The lead was 52-38 with 3:21 to play. Game over.

Shurman led Morton’s scoring with 9. Tenley Dowell, named to the all-tournament team, and Caylie Jones, who did fine defensive work on Rock Island’s star, had 8 apiece. Josi Becker scored 6, Jacey Wharram 4, Lindsey Dullard 3, and Courtney Jones 2.

With his players in the locker room afterwards, the Morton coach, Bob Becker, did a little speech of reassurance that all is well. Aside from the rebounding problems – “It’s something to work on, and we will” – there were positives to take from the week. Eleven of Becker’s 13 players are underclassmen. Some played under big-game pressure in a big arena for the first time. What happens in December is important, Becker said, but what matters most is what happens in February and March, state tournament time.

“At 14-1 we’re a really, really good team,” Becker told the players. Yes, it would have been nice to win the Holiday Classic. But a two-time defending state champion that has announced its hopes of a three-peat can live without a Classic trophy. “Our goal,” he said, “is to get back and win the big one.”

He also spoke to Brandi Bisping, seated cross-legged on the locker room floor.

“You,” he said, smiling, “go home and sit on the couch.”

A note of historical import: On this date two years ago, December 30, 2014, the Potters made their only other appearance in the Holiday Classic championship game. They lost by 25 to U High. Sixty-seven days later, on March 7, 2015, they won the state championship.