With three minutes to play, en route to a 64-37 romp tonight, Bob Becker suddenly remembered “Pickle.”

The Morton High School Lady Potters had practiced the play Friday and Becker had waited for the right moment to use it.

But all night against Bloomington, lost in his coaching bubble where nothing matters except what’s in front of him, the coach had forgotten about the special play created for this game.

So he called timeout.

He looked over the heads of his players on the bench. He looked up into the second row of the bleachers.

He called out to a girl there, “C’mon, Gaby, draw it up.”

Gaby Heer took a deep breath. She didn’t move. Maybe she couldn’t move.

“C’mon, Gaby, come down here,” the coach said.

Gaby Heer, a 7th-grader 13 years old, climbed over the varsity’s bench. She took the whiteboard from a coach whose team has won three straight state championships. Kneeling on the court, surrounded by Lady Potters paying attention, Heer used Becker’s Sharpie to make some X’s and squiggly lines that, if you know basketball, wound up looking like an out-of-bounds play.

Why did Heer name the play “Pickle.”

“I don’t know,” she said. (A year ago Becker said that same thing when I asked why one of his team important drills was called “Raytown.”)

“Pickle” was part of the deal the Lady Potters made with the Morton Community Foundation. The high bidder for a package called “The Potter Experience” would get to attend a team practice, meet the team in the locker room before the game, operate the spotlight for starters’ introductions, sit in the bleachers directly behind the team, and eat pizza with the varsity after the game. All that in addition to drawing up a play that the Potters would run.

A group of parents donated $400 to the Foundation. They helped make a memory for their 12 daughters, all 7th and 8th grade basketball players: Gaby Heer, Molly Shook, Abby Moore, Taylor Barnard, Abbey Pollard, Katie Davis, Julia Keith, Emma Skinner, Maggie Hobson, Paige Griffin, Paige Chapin, and Emma Fonseca.

Alas, “Pickle” didn’t result in an easy basket. But Becker took the blame for that.

“Honestly, I just forgot it,” he said. “We’d practiced it with the starters and they knew the play. But by the time I remembered it, we had reserves in the game.”

So “Pickle” got a little scrambled, as Coach Heer reported to the press later. “They didn’t set the down screen for the wing,” she said, and the press made a note reminding itself it’s not as smart as a 7th-grader.

Anyway, by then the Lady Potters had done enough things perfectly that the slightest of imperfections went unnoticed as they won for the sixth time in seven starts.

Bloomington scored the game’s first four points, but Morton scored the next 10 – five each in less than two minutes by Tenley Dowell and Lindsey Dullard. At quarter’s end it was 19-8, at halftime 32-15, and in the last minute of the third quarter it was 49-22.

The Potters did it with defense that reduced Bloomington’s offense to out-of-control drives and 3-pointers put up by people who had trouble scoring from under the basket.

The Potters’ offense left Bloomington in tatters. If not coasting in on transition baskets created by full-court pressure, they scored from long distance. From all points of the compass, they threw in 3-pointers, a dozren of them. Kassidly Shurman had 4, Dullard 3, Dowell 2..

Dowell led the scorers with 20, Shurman had 12, Dullard 11, Caylie Jones 6, Courtney Jones and Josi Becker 5 each, Katherine Reiman 3, and Bridget Wood 2.