Josi Becker was laughing. First, though, she was sprinting past her team’s bench. Sprinting back on defense, she gave the ball-handler neither time nor room to breathe let alone make a rational decision. Becker hounded the poor girl to such distraction that the girl went this way and the ball went that way. And Becker’s father, the coach, said, “YESSS!” It was about then that Josi Becker looked at the coach, her father, and laughed.

“What,” I asked later, “were you laughing about?”

She was mystified.

“I don’t know,” she said.

I put a time on the moment. “Right at the end of the first quarter . . . ”

“I really don’t remember,” she said, and that’s a perfect answer when a guy’s asking you to remember one of a thousand seconds in a kaleidoscopic, shape-shifting game that asks its players to come up instantly with thousands of answers to questions of geometry and physics.

Ah, yes. Yes, I hear you. I hear you saying quit it. It’s not that complicated/ Get the ball, throw it in the hole.

The best players do make it look easy. Sometimes, as in the Morton High School Lady Potters victory tonight – 60-45 over Limestone High, giving the Potters the Mid-Illini Conference championship – in such easy victories, with one team better than the other in every way, the game does seem simple.

It’s not. Look, if you will, at one possession by the Potters. One of its 50 possessions in the game. One possession against a Limestone zone defense that has been good enough to make the Rockets the second-best team in the Mid-Illini (8-3 coming in tonight).

It’s one possession that lasts maybe 30 seconds. It is a thing of basketball beauty, the game played the way it’s played by basketball’s best team, the Golden State Warriors. The ball keeps moving. No one holds it longer than a beat. No one bounces it twice. (Except Steph Curry, who can do whatever the hell he wants.) Soon enough, as the ball keeps moving, it finds the hole – as the Potters did when . . .

Brandi Bisping in-bounds it from under her own hoop. Gives it to Josi Becker, who moves it up the left-side arc to Kassidy Shurman. Back to Becker and into the paint to Jacey Wharram. Who kicks it out to Shurman, who thinks a 3 but is hurried. She hurls it cross-court to Tenley Dowell. Two or three steps in, then back to Shurman. That’s the seventh pass of the possession. It’s not the last. Shurman tries Wharram inside again. No go. Out to Becker, back to Bisping, to Shurman. Now to Dowell, whose missed 3 is rebounded by Bisping and given back to Dowell. Now the ball finds the hole, a driving Dowell layup off the glass.

Simple?

All five Potters had touches. They made 13 passes in maybe 30 seconds.

Beautiful.

Dowell’s layup gave Morton a 20-point lead at 41-21 with 2:54 to play in the third quarter. The Potters were up by as many as 24 early in the fourth quarter before the reserves coasted in.

As efficient as the Potters were offensively, they were better on defense. “We were really good defensively for long parts of the game,” Bob Becker said. And if his team’s defense pleased this coach who loves defense – who loves it, certainly, when his daughter takes time to laugh on the defensive end – we should know this by now: that defense was really, really good tonight.

Again, as always, and I repeat myself because the truth doesn’t change, the Potters contested every pass and every movement toward the basket. Against Morton’s full-court pressure, the poor, poor Limestone girls had to have considered it a victory to get the ball into their end of the court. And then the discombobulation truly began in what I have decided to call “turnover-by-attrition.” That is, against Morton’s defense, sooner or later, unable to make a good play, you are going to make a bad play. I kept track in the first half alone: Limestone was called for three charges, twice traveled, and once went over-and-back.

Becker’s white board reminded his players: “In 1st 3:00 Set the Tone.” Three minutes in, the Potters led, 7-2, on a Dowell floater, a Josi Becker 3, and another driving bucket by Dowell. At quarter’s end, 15-4. Josi laughed. Game Over.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 15. Three more Potters had 10 apiece: Becker, Lindsey Dullard, and Caylie Jones. Shurman and Bisping each had 6, Maddy Becker 3. Again good from outside, the Potters made 7 3’s, giving them 193 for the season, a 7.1 per game average.

Bisping had 10 rebounds and now has 1,013 for her career. The Potters’ all-time leading rebounder is Cindy Bumgarner, who had 1,049.

Speaking of Bob Becker, as we were, let me say one thing more . . .

Two days ago, the Illinois High School Association named its girls’ basketball Coach of the Year for the 2015-16 season. Had anyone asked me to guess the winner of that award, I’d have said, “I have no idea. But I know a guy whose team went 33-3 and won the state championship at the Class 3A level. In fact, his teams went 33-3 back-to-back and won back-to-back state championships. Pretty good. Name’s Bob Becker.”

The IHSA girls Coach of the Year was Tom Dooley.

You don’t know Tom Dooley and neither do I, but he has to be good. At Moweaqua, he coached the Class 1A state champions two years ago. Last season his Central A&M High School team reached the championship game again, only to lose. In those two seasons his teams went 33-1 and 32-2. Moweaqua is a dot on the map just south of Decatur, the kind of map-dot that I grew up in, a map-dot that will remember those Tom Dooley teams forever.

This year not so much, 13-12 so far. Becker’s team is 25-2.