Better than a night at the circus, this was. You can have your trapeze aerialists and lions leaping through flames. Give me Senior Night at a full-house, full-throated Potterdome. Give me the Morton High School dance team and the best Pep Band in the land. Give me the CO-ED gymnasts, or tumblers, or whatever they were, dozens of daring young men and women twisting through the air and coming to Earth in ways that surely meant business for every chiropractor in town.

Yea, verily, give me the Lady Potters 60, Canton 32. On this night when three seniors played at home for the last time, let me hear Bob Becker quote a wise old poet. “I don’t make a habit of reading Dr. Seuss,” the Potters’ coach said, “But he said, ‘Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.’”

What’s happened with this senior class – with Josi Becker, Caylie Jones, and Kassidy Shurman – is that they started winning basketball games early and never stopped. The first time I saw those three, at Parkside Elementary in Normal, they won a state championship for Morton Junior High. The next year, they lost once. Their grade school record: 52-1. In these last four years, the Potters varsity has won 127 games and lost 9. Add it up: 179 victories, 10 defeats. Becker declared them “the winningest class in Potters history.”

The best part is, they’re not done.

Not even close to done.

We’re about to start three more weeks of Seussian smiling. There’s a regional, a sectional, a super-sectional, and a weekend at Redbird Arena.

“If they go down,” Becker said, thinking of the journey ahead, “they’ll go down fighting.”

Wait.

He didn’t like what he heard himself say.

So he said, “But I don’t think they’re going to go down. They’re going to win.”

Not that long ago, such talk could have been dismissed as bravado. Who could imagine little Morton high school winning a state championship against the big-city schools from up north? But that was then, this is now. Now the Potters have won the thing three straight years. And now it is altogether right, fitting, and proper that Becker should declare that winning a fourth straight championship is more than just a dream, he expects it.

And why not? The Potters are on a 24-game winning streak. They’re 27-1 for the season. At 13-0 with one conference game to play – at Washington this Friday – they have clinched the Mid-Illini championship in a season of such sustained dominance that Becker said, “They have been so consistently excellent, it’s amazing.”

Here’s a note about the Potters’ consistency. Remember their game in Canton in December? Morton won, 62-44. I spoke with the Canton coach afterward and heard her say something that anyone around the Mid-Illini for two or three minutes should have thought twice about saying. She said, “There’ll be a different outcome next time.” I suppose the argument could be made that she was right about a different outcome. Instead of losing by 18, this time she lost by 28.

For a while, Canton seemed to have a chance. Though Morton ran off the game’s first nine points in fewer than three minutes, its halftime lead was only 23-17. But in keeping with strategy, tactics and habit, the Potters torched Canton in the early minutes of the third quarter.

“Our kids just flew around on defense,” Becker said. “That got us into an up-tempo attack and got Canton back on their heels.” The scrambling, trapping defense produced a 12-0 run on the way to a 41-21 lead. Midway through the fourth quarter, another 12-0 run made it 56-29. At that point, the different outcome was so certain that Morton’s rambunctious student section serenaded the visitors from Canton: “Drive home safely . . . . Drive home safely.”

Becker had planned to take his three seniors out of the game one by one, giving each a chance to hear applause for a career well done. But the way the game broke, and perhaps more fittingly, they came out together. Becker hugged them all, his daughter Josi first, then Caylie Jones, then Kassidy Shurman. And teammates rose from the bench to join in a group hug that might have been a dozen deep.

I asked them how it felt, this last time in the Potterdlome.

“I feel like I should be a freshman,” Kassidy said.

“I’ve been to a lot of Senior Nights,” Josi said. “Now, that’s us.”

“All season I’ve been thinking of ‘last’ things,” Caylie said.

Coincidentally, each senior plans to study medicine in college, a conjunction of ambitions that caused their coach, Becker, to say, “These girls have not just played ‘with’ each other, they’ve played ‘for’ each other. It wouldn’t surprise me if someday they go into practice together, the Kassidy-Josi-Caylie Medical Clinic.”

Tenley Dowell led Morton’s scoring tonight with 20. Lindsey Dullard had 18 (with four 3-pointers). Caylie Jones and Shurman had 6 apiece. Courtney Jones and Josi Becker had 4 each. Maddy Becker had 2.