Some nights the game doesn’t much matter. The score was 90-33, the Lady Potters over somebody named East Peoria. What mattered most was that the Potters made it Brooke Bisping’s night by retiring her jersey.

Never more than 5-foot-7 and yet often playing inside, Bisping is still the Potters’ all-time leading scorer seven years after graduation. Her name decorates the record book everywhere from rebounds to 3’s to steals. She is only the third Lady Potter whose jersey now hangs in the Potterdome, there with Cindy Bumgarner and Tracy Pontius. In thanking her parents, teammates, coaches, and God, Bisping declared herself “honored” and “blessed.”

Even after the current back-to-back state championships, some people believe the Potters’ 2006-07 team was the program’s best. Bisping was a sophomore on that team led by the four-year starter Pontius, a sensational scorer and ball-handler who went on to star at Bowling Green University. It’s telling, then, that Pontius counts herself lucky to have been in Bisping’s company.

“She was a great all-around player and a deadly 3-point and free throw shooter,” Pontius told me. “It was great to watch her grow as a player and become more confident in herself. I had faith in her to make the big shot we needed or get the steal we needed at critical times. She was a great player and an even better person. She is the type of person who would do anything for you.”

To study up for the proceedings, I tracked down a video tape of Bisping as a junior. I had never seen her play, save for a single game her senior year. On the tape – a game against Limestone for a regional championship in ’08 – Bisping does the remarkable thing of playing remarkably without doing anything remarkable. Translation: she did everything well. She made no turnovers. She played stand-your-ground defense. She missed no shots. (Literally. Perfect from the field, perfect at the line, 25 points in a 64-39 victory.) As she ran to the bench with victory assured, her face was aglow with a smile born of work well done in a game her team won. You gotta love that girl.

Now, back to tonight’s game . . .

Had the people from the eastern banks of the Illinois River been good at any one basketball thing, this might have been a game. The East Peorians were bad at every basketball thing. Worse for them, they were bad on a night the Potters were impenetrable on defense, unstoppable on offense, uncatchable on the run, and double-damn dogged in pursuit of every loose ball, as in an early-game moment in East Peoria’s end when . . .

Josi Becker dove under an East Peoria girl – maybe the girl with a broken nose (we’ll get back to her in a minute) . . .

And Becker didn’t really grab the ball while skidding on the court, but . . .

She had her hands on it solidly enough to scoop it toward Kassidy Shurman, who . . .

Spotted Tenley Dowell sprinting away and tossed the ball downcourt so quickly that . . .

Dowell dropped in a layup before Becker, who’d started the whole thing, got untangled from the East Peoria girl.

And so it went for the Potters all night long in the 90-33 victory that was nowhere near as close as the score might indicate. Such can be said of few 57-point victories. But this was one of those few. Had it been 119-3 it would have come as no surprise to anyone who knows there’s air in the Wilson.

The Potters’ 90 points were their most in at least the last seven seasons. (They had 85 against Bloomington a year ago. Their record is 96 against East Peoria in 1990.)

With five different Potters contributing, they made 13 3-pointers. Josi Becker led the scoring with 22, Dowell had 14, Caylie Jones and Shurman 12 each, Bridget Wood 9, Courtney Jones and Jacey Wharram 8 each, Lindsey Dullard 5.

The Lady Potters are now 15-1, East Peoria is 3-12, and maybe you, though not I, can imagine the basketball skills of three teams bad enough to have lost to East Peoria.

“Redemption night,” said my neighbor in the bleachers. She remembered that East Peoria defeated the Potters last season, 37-35. For centuries that game will live as one of the universe’s mysteries. It was one of Morton’s three losses in its state championship campaign; at one point the Potters trailed 25-5. After that game, the winning coach refused to talk to me, apparently on grounds that I had insulted her and her cheap-shot team the year before. My neighbor rooted for a 60-point victory while I would have been happy with a greater margin, perhaps the difference between 119 and 3.

Earlier here I mentioned the East Peoria player wearing a transparent mask, held against the head by straps, usually to protect a broken nose. My neighbor noticed that mask, too. In fact, at one point as I grocery-listed the ways in which the East Peorians insulted the game of basketball, my neighbor said, “But you do have to give them props for the Hannibal Lechter mask.”