Morton’s Lady Potters 85, East Peoria 9

Well.

Let’s see.

No, I can’t say that.

That, either.

But I gotta start somewhere, so how about this . . .

With a minute and 25 seconds to play in the third quarter, Morton’s Bridget Wood made a free throw. As the ball slipped through the net, nine Potters leaped off the bench, cheering like crazy, creating a sudden explosion of happiness seldom seen outside the last seconds of a state championship game.

I checked my pulse. Was I alive? I rubbed my eyes. Had I slept through nerve-wracking suspense surrounding Wood’s free throw? I looked at the scoreboard. It showed Wood had moved Morton’s lead to 59-7. I looked at Wood. She looked at the bench. She smiled and started laughing, right there at the line while the referee, waiting to toss her the ball again, wondered, like the rest of us, “Huh?”

But Wood knew what those funsters on the bench were doing because she’d done it herself. To stay awake on nights like this, the reserves decide among themselves they’re going to go crazy when one of their buddies does something. This time she just happened to be the one doing the something.

“And I couldn’t stop laughing,” Wood said later. She stopped long enough to make the second free throw, too.

Or I could start like this . . .

The Morton coach, Bob Becker, with the game well in hand, sent in six substitutes at once. That decision seemed to be a bit of overkill. The Potters led by 46 points and East Peoria hadn’t scored since the day Abe Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg. It might have been more generous to the visitors from East Peoria had Becker decided to play three girls rather than six.

As the six checked in at the scorer’s table, one, the sophomore Raquel Frakes, noticed there were six of them.

“I wasn’t supposed to be with that group, I was with the next group,” she said later, explaining her smiling, sheepish slinking back to the bench. “Embarrassing,” she said.

Or maybe I should start with Makenna Baughman under the basket, which is where the junior plays and where she had the ball in a crowd of East Peorians when she decided, hey, why not?

“I saw an opening,” she said, and she went up for a nifty reverse layup off the glass that brought the reserves off the bench and celebrating in sincerity this time.

If not with Wood and Baughman and Frakes, I could start simply by saying the Potters just keep doing it. They’re 20-2 for the season, 8-0 in the Mid-Illini Conference. “The kids were just great,” Becker said, and I am here to say they were so good at both ends as to supply a full answer to the question: Are the Potters that good? Yes. On defense, they dared East Peoria to complete a pass. On offense, they dared East Peoria to make a stop. This was basketball of the Golden State Warriors kind.

Or, maybe, in light of recent developments, I should start this way . . .

“Be kind, Dave,” someone said. Everyone’s an editor, y’know, and all those editors in FacebookNation thought I had not been fully appreciative of East Peoria’s effort in its recent narrow loss to the Potters, 67-13. So, in the wake of tonight’s nail-biter, they counseled me to emphasize East Peoria’s good work. As luck would have it, I made notes that caught East Peoria’s very best moments, late in the third quarter.

In a stirring rally that ran 57 seconds, East Peoria outscored Morton, 4-2. Suddenly, the visitors had reduced the Potters’ lead to 51 points at 58-7.

“Behave,” another someone said. That admonition is more difficult for an old man so angry, so belligerent, so persistently evil that he often wears mismatched socks just to annoy his loved ones. But with that editor’s order ringing in my ears, I am here to say one gentlemanly thing about East Peoria.

Had the game gone on into February, the way East Peoria was cutting into Morton’s lead two points at a time, they might have caught up by Valentine’s Day.

But alas, alack, and sad to say for the East Peorians, their brave rally had a short life. Morton went on to score the game’s next 25 points. And the game ended just after 8 o’clock on January 18, the same day it started.

There, I feel better already.

Maddy Becker, with three 3’s, led Morton’s scoring with 17. Tenley Dowell had 16 and Katie Krupa 11. Lindsey Dullard had 8, Wood and Olivia Remmert 6, Kathryn Reiman 5, Courtney Jones and Frakes 4, with 2 apiece from Baughman, Addie Cox, Peyton Dearing, and Megan Gold.

(For more on the Lady Potters, go to Mortonladypotters.com. Thanks.)