Bob Becker was up to serious foot-stompin’. Shoe leather collided with hardwood, ker-BOOM. Because the coach has reached that mid-life age when bifocals become necessary, it’s fun to see how the stompin’ and other dance moves affect his glasses. Today’s choreography had Becker removing the glasses, spinning them by an earpiece, and then, after staring termination holes through a purblind zebra, placing the glasses on the scorer’s table to keep them out of harm’s way.

The stompin’ had caused a referee of a sensitive nature to call a technical foul on the coach. Such calls can change a game. They can be dispiriting, or they can be inspiring. At the time, Becker’s team, the Morton High School Lady Potters, had a 12-point lead. Five minutes later, the lead was down to three.

“I might have cost us there,” the coach said. “But the kids overcame it.”

They overcame it to win, 58-45. They overcame it with sensational play when only sensational play could do it. A good, big, aggressive Lincoln team – winner of 13 of 19 games – closed to 46-43 with six minutes to play. But the Potters would not allow Lincoln another inch.

First, Becker’s decision to switch from man-to-man defense to a 2-3 zone and then a box-and-1 stopped Lincoln’s offense dead. Lincoln had rallied on the strength of five second-half 3-pointers. Once Morton confused the Railsplitters with the new defenses, they went 0-for-4 on 3’s the rest of the way.

Meanwhile, the Potters won as they so often do, by making a big run at a killing time. From that 46-43 moment, they scored the next 10 points. That 10-0 run propelled the Potters to their 16th straight victory, 19th in 20 games this season, and 34th in 35 games reaching back to last season.

Caylie Jones began the game-deciding run with two free throws coming after she was fouled getting an offensive rebound. Lindsey Dullard followed with a 3-pointer from the left side. Then the Potters, per a long-established late-game formula, ran off five successive free throws – two by Josi Becker and three by Tenley Dowell. One of those Dowell free throws came after another Jones rebound, that one when she grabbed Becker’s missed layup and got the ball out to Dowell.

“Caylie was great all day,” Becker said, “giving us offensive rebounds that meant extra possessions and opportunities.” One such opportunity, cashed in, saved three points when it seemed three points had been wasted. Fouled on a 3-point shot, Peyton Dearing missed all three free throws. On the last one, the 5-foot-8 Jones worked inside the bigger Lincoln people for the rebound. She passed the ball to Dearing, who moved it out to Josi Becker, who made a 3-pointer from the right arc. State champion teams do that kind of thing, or, to quote Jones, “We stayed calm when they got it down to three and put pressure on us.”

A brief explanation of Bob Becker’s technical foul: he had seen his sophomore guard, Maddy Becker, dribble into a trap. He signaled for a timeout to save her. Before a referee could grant the timeout – “He was looking straight at me,” Becker said – another official called a jump ball that gave the possession to Lincoln.

Thus, ker-BOOM!

Thus, a technical.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well, and all this Potters success comes at a good time. They have embarked on a stretch games so challenging that the Morton coaches call it “The Gauntlet” and so important to late-season growth that Becker said, “This is when you get ready to win a state championship.”

He’s talking about these mid-January games in the Galesburg Martin Luther King Winter Classic. These games ask the Potters to play three times in four days on successive weekends. In the last three seasons, when the Potters have won state championships, they have gone 4-1, 4-1, and 5-0 in the MLK tournament.

Today the Potters began their run through that gauntlet with a doubleheader sweep, 52-16 over LaSalle-Peru in the morning followed by the afternoon victory over Lincoln. Monday afternoon they play another MLK game, at Peoria High. And the way things are going, the Potters have good reason to think of an unprecedented fourth straight girls’ state title. In their three championship seasons, the Potters have come to the 20-game mark with records of 19-1, 19-1, and 18-2. With today’s two victories, the Potters are again 19-1. (Two boys teams have won four in a row, Peoria Manual and Chicago Simeon.)

The 10:30 a.m. game against LaSalle-Peru was enough to make a guy wonder why he got out of bed. Morton was up 31-4 midway through the second quarter. The game’s only memorable moment came late. Players on the bench asked Tenley Dowell if she’d please bring them Gatorade.

So the team’s leading scorer gathered up four paper cups, balancing them as she walked to the training room. She came back with three filled cups and had to make a second trip for the fourth. As to why she couldn’t carry all four at once, Dowell blamed her inexperience at such work: “I’m not, like, a waiter.”

She is, however, a scorer, leading Morton with 15 in this game. Dullard had 14, Dearing 5, Claire Kraft and Courtney Jones 4 each, Bridget Wood and Kassidy Shurman 3 each, and Josi Becker and Olivia Remmert 2 apiece.

Dowell led Morton in the Lincoln game, too, with 14 as four Potters reached double figures. Dullard had 13, Shurman 11 (all in the first half), and Caylie Jones 10. Becker scored 7, Dearing 3.

After the day’s work, Bob Becker made one note of how the Potters might improve.

He said, “I may need to get one of those straps to hold my glasses on.”