So it was 40-9 when Addy Engel moved quickly to mid-court and launched a shot from 45 feet hoping to beat the buzzer at halftime. Even as the ball was in the air, I, for one, thought, “Huh?”

There were eight seconds left. Time enough for a layup. Time enough to go to Jimmy John’s and come back with a ham sandwich and a Coke.

“I had heard those guys go ‘3, 2, 1, shoot it’ when Manual came down,” Engel said.

Those guys were five Potters fans on the first row at courtside. Pale facsimile that they were, they yet were reminders of the raucous Bobby’s Boys claque that added teen-boy drama to the Potters state championship years of ’15, ’16, ’17, ’19.

Engel figured the 3-2-1-shoot-it chant was designed to mislead Manual’s shooters. Still, when the ball came to her, she said, "I thought the buzzer must be about to go off.”

Instead, her shot clanged high off the backboard, was batted around for a while, and then, as her embarrassment morphed into self-conscious laughter (for what else is a girl to do in such a moment?), it was then and only then, at last, finally, came the happy sound of the buzzer.

“When it didn’t go off,” Engel said, “I looked up and saw there were four seconds to go.”

Well, things happen, y’know? And nice that it happened with the Potters rolling. They moved to 11-3 for the season and take a seven-game winning streak into next week’s State Farm Holiday Classic. Their coach, Bob Becker, was well pleased.

“Obviously, we had challenging games up front,” he said. The allusion was to early-season losses to the region’s best teams (Peoria High, Peoria Notre Dame, Lincoln). “But our girls handled it with the right mindset, and we’re growing from it. . . .Our prospects are pretty promising.”

There’s not much else to say about this game other than one team knew how to play basketball and the other team, now 3-9 for the season….

. . . had a girl with pink hair.

The first time she appeared in my notes, it was about her look. She was #30 for Manual, a 5-foot-6 junior guard, Cameeya Wade. From my seat in the bleachers, I scooched over to Maria Lopko, a Potter alum home for Christmas. I said, “Maria! That pink hair . . . ?”

My fashion consultant said, “A wig, yes.”

Five minutes in, Cameeya Wade, who would turn out to be a charming interview, had taken three shots. Put up under defensive pressure by good defenders, all three shots became airballs, the most noteworthy a 10-footer that seemed destined to scrape the girders way up there, a rocket rising into the atmosphere only to fizzle alarmingly and fall to earth near Cameeya’s feet.

Naturally, I sought out Cameeya afterwards. As an even younger man, I had interviewed Muhammad Ali, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Charlize Theron, seven U.S. Senators, Stan Musial, and a Louisville taxi driver who kept her pony in the back seat. Now it was time to speak to a girls high school basketball player about her pink wig.

“The wig, Cameeya,” I said, “do you have other wigs?”

“A green one,” she said.

“Green?” a man said, that man me, me remembering that Ali, near 40, told me he had dyed his sideburns to get rid of the gray, me remembering a morning when Howard Cosell appeared in his kitchen in his underwear and without his toupee, a sight burned into these eyes forever.

“A black one,” Cameeya said. “And burgundy, and blonde, and this one, the pink.”

“Why,” I said, “the pink tonight?”

“The pink is my prettiest,” she said.

I have no hairdo reports on the Potters. I do have the scoring. Ellie VanMeenen led with 17, all in the first half. Engel had 14, Anja Ruxlow 7, Paige Selke 6, Abby VanMeenen 6, Payton Hays 5, Izzy Hutchinson 4, Emelia Miller 3, Julia Laufenberg 2.