It’s not supposed to be easy. This one wasn’t. They began it late and they kept playing forblessedever. Third quarter, it was 10:09 p.m. I asterisked a note: *YAWN. Then came, oh no, an overtime. It got to be three of four yawns into the night. Afterwards, nigh onto midnight, I asked the Potters’ senior guard, Izzy Hutchinson, “On a normal school night, would you be asleep by now?”

“No, no,” she said. She explained that a high school basketball player’s day starts just after dawn. School. After classes, two hours of basketball practice. Drags herself home for dinner. Unwinds. Time to sleep, but no. Every night, because it’s always there and it never ends, there’s homework.

“I get to bed at 1 a.m.,” Izzy said.

Some overtime games are all-night thrillers. Others are not. This was one of the others. I could write a thousand words on why that is, and they’d put you to sleep. So let’s say this. After back-to-back sensational performances put them in this semifinal of the State Farm Holiday Classic, the Lady Potters ran out of sensations.

What they had is stuff that’s not so spectacular but often more important.

“We’ve got a lot of grit,” the Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, said. Then, in one long sentence, this: “I wasn’t at my best tonight, and our team wasn’t at its best tonight, but great teams, and this is a great team, I’m not kidding, I’ve been telling you it’s building, we are a great team, and it was another sign of that tonight that when we were not at our best we did enough to win, and the great teams do that, and tonight we found a way, we made a way.”

Two nights ago, they beat the tournament’s #2 seed. This night, they beat the #3 seed. They’ve now won 10 straight, 14 of 17, and Saturday night they get a shot at #1, Normal Community, with the big trophy at stake.

Let’s cut the thousand-word essay to a couple hundred. Let’s say the Potters offense was a sputtering mess of malfunctions. Only their defense kept it close. Let’s cut to the chase, the fourth quarter, when they came from four down to take their first lead of the night, 36-34, on two Addy Engel buckets, a 3-pointer and a layup after Hutchinson knocked away a Quincy pass, chased it to the baseline, and made a sneaky little pass through a crowd in the paint to Engel, flying to join in the fun.

Ellie VanMeenen’s 3-pointer gave Morton a 39-36 lead with 4:28 to play, but a minute later Quincy made a 3 of its own, and it was 39-all going into overtime.

First possession. Engel again. As it turned out, her lightning-quick layup gave Morton a 41-39 lead that was enough to win. Up by one with 12.9 seconds to play, Hutchinson added a free throw. Quincy managed only an off-balance, awkward prayer of a shot, the prayer unanswered, and we all got to go home.

I’s now 1:21 a.m. in my house. Casey, the cat, is meowing for a snack. The old man will have a beer. Unwinding.

Engel led Morton’s scoring with 22. (“Addy’s all-tournament, all-state,” Becker said.) Hutchinson had 8 points, Abby VanMeenen 5, Ellie VanMeenen 5, Paige Selke 2.