On March 4, 2017, after his team’s shoot-around before it played that afternoon for a third straight state championship, the Morton High School coach, Bob Becker, gathered the Lady Potters at midcourt in the Potterdome. No matter what might happen in five hours, he said, “I love you.” And he said, “The highlight of my day, every day, is coming to practice and being with you.”

Tonight, nine months later, I reminded Becker of that moment and said, “Still true?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Forever.”

Then, with a smile, “It’s never been a job for me. It’s what I love to do.”

I didn’t expect much of a game tonight. It wasn’t. A 19-0 run across the first two quarters jump-started the Potters to a 60-34 victory over Limestone. So let’s talk first about Becker. This week, late to the party, the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association announced what most of us have long known. Robert Cantley Becker III is a Hall of Fame coach.

He has created teams with poise and guts. He preaches “consistent excellence” built on a culture of confidence and belief. He wants his players to move with “humble swagger.” He maximizes strengths, minimizes weaknesses. His teams master fundamentals. (That last-game morning of March 4 he had the Potters doing first-day ball-handling drills.) That mastery, limiting mistakes, allows Becker’s teams to put constant pressure on opponents at both ends of the floor. Now in his 19th season as the Potters’ head coach, Becker has become a superb in-game strategist and tactician.

Wait. Go back a couple paragraphs. He said the “love” word. It reminded me of my all-time favorite summary of the coach’s work. It came from his wife, Evelyn. (“The perfect coach’s wife,” the coach said tonight.) Evelyn Becker can tell you she gave birth to their daughter, Josi, on Nov. 21, 1999. That was the day after Evelyn watched her husband’s first Potters team won its first tournament championship at Eureka.

I had asked Evelyn if Bob liked basketball.

“He doesn’t like basketball,” she said. “He loves it.”

She counted the ways.

“He loves it all. The homework. The video watching, the strategizing, x’s and o’s, the scouting. He just loves the game. He loves basketball.”

Before Becker, the Lady Potters had not won a regional championship in 15 seasons. They had never won a sectional, and the idea of earning a trip to Redbird Arena for the state finals was the stuff of fools. After Becker, surprise moved to astonishment to the unbelievable. In the last 13 years, Morton has won 11 regionals. In the last 10 years, they have won six sectionals. Out of those six sectionals, they reached the Final Four five times. They finished fourth in ’07 and again in ’13 before winning it all the last three years.

Players keep showing up, thanks to Morton’s youth basketball program, the Heat, which has produced a line of talented athletes eager to become Potters. Those players work at the game through summers just as the high schoolers commit summers to AAU programs.

“We’ve got great parents, great players, and great coaches,” Becker said. “This team, these are the best kids a coach could have. They’re an elite group, academically, socially, on the court and off the court.”

Here are Becker’s career numbers: 422 victories, 145 defeats. His teams have won at least 30 games in a season six times and at least 21 11 times. They have had 15 consecutive winning seasons. In the last eight seasons the Potters have won 221, lost 28. The last three seasons and eight games this year, they are 107and 9.

Now, tonight’s game which moved the Potters’ season record to 7-1 and made them 2-0 in the Mid-Illini Conference . . .

One minute, 39 seconds into the game, Limestone led, 3-2.

Eight minutes, 48 seconds later, Morton led, 21-3.

That 19-0 run started with a Tenley Dowell floater in the lane and ended with a Dowell layup off a steal. In that run, Dowell scored 10 points her way to a game-high 18.

She had help in there. Kassidy Shurman swished a 3. Lindsey Dullard and Caylie Jones put back rebounds. Maddy Becker scored on a breakaway layup.

Soon enough, because one team was much better than the other in every regard, the score was 42-11.

By the game’s merciful end, 11 Potters had scored: Dowell 18, Shurman 9, Maddy Becker 8, Bridget Wood 5, Caylie Jones 4, Dullard 4, Josi Becker 3, Katharine Reiman 3, Olivia Remmert 3, Courtney Jones 2, Claire Kraft 1.