A wonderful Pink Night in the Potterdome. A thousand people there. Dance team. Cheerleaders. Pep Band. Lights down for introductions, players ran onto the court in the dark waving glowsticks. Lights up, they gave the Illinois Cancer Care Foundation $5,000. They clambered into the bleachers with pink roses for cancer survivors. We again saw the video of Mary Schultz, three years gone, singing The Star Spangled Banner, as she did when her daughters were players, as she will do for all of us always.

It’s a basketball night and it’s more than basketball. It’s a reminder of cancer’s reach. Two places down from me on the third row behind the players’ bench, a white-haired woman took a pink rose from Courtney Jones, a rosy-cheeked sophomore. “These kids have big hearts,” Bob Becker, the Morton High School Lady Potters’ coach, said. “On a night like this, they realize they’re fighting for a cause bigger than themselves. Just a great night altogether, a meaningful night. And then the kids did their basketball job.”

It was Morton 59, Dunlap 44.

Never a doubt, and no surprise in that, for the Potters are playing at a high level. Nor was it any surprise on this night when the Potters kicked it up a gear. They have made that their habit, too. From working with simple competence, they fly into brilliance. Quick-striking runs leave opponents wondering what just happened. In tonight’s five-minute run ending midway in the third quarter, the Potters did it with daggers from afar. They didn’t make one 3, or two 3’s. They didn’t make even three or four 3’s. They made six of ‘em. They outscored Dunlap 20-4 to build a 25-point lead.

The lead was only 27-18 late in the second quarter when Courtney Jones, the rosy-cheeked one, made a 3 from the top of the key. There was 1:02 showing on the clock. Exactly 39 seconds later, the ball came back to Jones outside the arc on the left side. Here she did a very unsophomore-like thing. She didn’t look to pass. She didn’t bounce it. She caught and shot, the way the senior stars do.

“I made the first one,” she said later, “so I thought, ‘Hopefully, this one goes in, too.’”

It did.

Bob Becker wants his Potters to dominate the early minutes of every third quarter.

Tonight they did.

Given Jones’s quick six points, the Potters opened the third with a 33-20 lead. With one Dunlap interruption, the Potters ran the score to 47-22. Lindsey Dullard opened with a 3. Tenley Dowell followed with a 4-foot floater of such imagination that it seemed launched from behind the board. Then Dullard came with another 3, and Kassidy Shurman took over. She made one 3 from the left corner and another from the right side. In exactly 4 minutes and 37 seconds, Morton did its 20-4 run.

Here Dunlap called timeout. One note-taker scribbled a note, “Like, they’ve got a plan?”

They had no rally-from-25-down plan. Morton, the three-times-running state 3A champion, now has won 21 straight games this season. They are 24-1 overall and 10-0 in the Mid-Illini. Reaching into last season, they have won 39 of their last 40 games. In their three state championship seasons and this one, they are 124-9.

They’re the kind of team that has a plan. For instance, Dunlap has a good inside player, Christina Britter, 6-foot-1, mobile, strong, a Division-1 commit. Morton’s plan was to defeat Britter with Caylie Jones, a 5-foot-8 senior.

“I would front her,” Caylie Jones said later. “But they key was to take a charge and get her in foul trouble.”

One minute and 22 seconds into the game, Britter thought to do her best offensive move, a spin move in the paint.

Guess what? Caylie Jones knew that. She overplayed to the spin-move side. And here came Britter knocking her down. A charging foul.

At 4:11 of the second quarter, Jones did it again. A second charging foul against Britter.

By the time Morton’s lead was 47-22, Britter had not scored.

“They always have a great, structured defense,” she said. “They keep me moving.” That’s a compliment, for Britter meant that Jones was so effective in denying entry passes that she could not stand still, accept passes, and make her offensive moves.

For Morton, the game’s only nervous-making moment came with 2:39 to play in the third quarter. Undercut on a rebound, the Potters’ leading scorer, Tenley Dowell, fell hard on her back. Her head seemed to strike the hardwood, and the sharpest sound was of her elbows hitting the floor. She lay there, dazed, in pain, until rising to walk to the trainer’s room. She was not seriously injured.

“My ponytail cushioned my head,” she said, smiling. And it was after the fall that she made her two 3’s for the night, a sign that all was well with her elbows.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 18. Dullard had 12 and Courtney Jones 10. Shurman and Josi Becker had 6 each, Maddy Becker 3, Caylie Jones 2, and Megan Gold 2.