Author: Dave Kindred

When the Morton High School Lady Potters are ahead late in a game, as they were in tonight’s 51-39 victory over Chicago St. Ignatius, it’s fun to watch what they do. They make people crazy. They play keep-away. Desperate defenders scramble after the ball. It’s here, it’s there, and by the time defenders figure out where the damn ball went, it’s gone somewhere else. You’ve seen cats chase their tails. It’s like that, only with a basketball.

The Potters spread the floor. Four players go to the corners of the court. One, Caylie Jones, takes up a spot above the free throw line. There she becomes the center of all ball movement. Now it’s a roulette wheel, the ball spinning around that center and where it stops no one knows. Trapped out front, Josi Becker, or Tenley Dowell, or Kassidy Shurman, gets rid of the ball by throwing it to Jones in the middle.

“My job then is ‘catch and look opposite,’” Jones said. If she takes a pass from her left, she looks to move the ball to someone in the right corner. Then it comes back out to the front and the wheel keeps spinning, the cat keeps chasing, and on this night the St. Ignatius people became frustrated and breathless. “Burned,” said their coach, Cara Doyle, shorthand for burned out and, perhaps, burned up by the futility of chasing the spinning ball.

The victory put the Potters in the championship game of the State Farm Holiday Classic for the third time in four years. Bob Becker, the Morton coach, said, “We’re right where we want to be.” With a chance to win the Classic for the first time, they will play Normal Community, an upset winner over previously undefeated Peoria Richwoods tonight. Morton beat Normal Community five weeks ago, 55-49.

Though the victory was Morton’s 10th straight and gives the team a 13-1 record, the issue seemed in doubt even three minutes into the fourth quarter. The Potters’ lead, once as large as a dozen points, had been reduced to five at 39-34. St. Ignatius may not have known it, but it was about to enter the minutes when Morton drives people nuts.

Whatever happened before no longer matters. That Morton went on a 10-0 run in the first quarter to establish a cushion it never lost, forget it. That St. Ignatius came back with a barrage of 3-pointers – it was 7-for-15 from behind the arc while Morton was 3-for-17 – forget that, too. The game would be won or lost in the frenetic last three minutes when Morton went to its spread-delay game.

In those three minutes, Morton made no turnovers against the St. Ignatius pressure. The Potters controlled the ball so well that St. Ignatius did not get the ball long enough to take a shot – not a single shot – until there were 21 seconds left. The Chicagoans had been forced into such a mad rush that they committed four straight turnovers. For those three minutes, the game was essentially confined to Morton’s end of the floor.

Meanwhile, unable to take the ball from Morton, St. Ignatius had to foul. The Potters’ last eight points and 10 of their last 12 came on free throws. It is a tried and true formula: get the lead, protect the ball, make free throws. It has helped the Potters win three straight state championships and it now has them on the brink of a Classic title that has eluded them for a decade and more.

So, yes, I wanted to see tonight’s game.

Snow?

What snow?

Snow was coming down, maybe six inches worth on the way, when a friend asked if I intended to drive to Normal for the game.

The things some people ask.

You know the postman’s motto. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

So, c’mon. Snow?

“Take an emergency bag, please,” she said in a text. “Blankets, water, snacks, and a flashlight in case of accident delays and/or your car dies en route.”

Do Christmas cookies count as snacks?

They did today. Santa’s cookies went into the back seat with boots, socks, a blanket, a flashlight, and gloves. I even found my AAA card. I was prepared for disaster. I told my friend, “Now I’m going to be disappointed if I don’t drive into a ditch.”

So I made it there and back, and that was a good thing, and it was good to see the Potters play well. Besides distributing the ball flawlessly under that great pressure late in the game, Caylie Jones was a major factor rebounding. Lindsey Dullard again excelled inside defensively. Tenley Dowell was an offensive force, gliding through defenses, and with Courtney Jones she starred defensively. They shared duties on St. Ignatius’s star guard, Molly Gannon, who had scored 20 and 17 points in her team’s first two Classic games; Gannon had only nine against the Potters, none in the game’s decisive last 11 minutes. “They did a great job on Molly,” Doyle, the St. Ignatius coach, said. “They were all over her.”

• Dullard led Morton’s scorers with 14, Dowell had 11, Josi Becker 10. Coufrtney Jones scored 5, Caylie Jones 4, Maddy Becker 3, and Megan Gold and Kassidy Shurman 2 each.

Uncharacteristically, the Morton High School Lady Potters lost most of a big lead in the fourth quarter tonight before remembering how they win important games. Once up by 20, they led by only seven with two minutes to play. Then they made 9 of 10 free throws – eight in a row by Josi Becker – to finish a 63-49 victory over Normal West and advance to the semifinals of the State Farm Holiday Classic, a prestigious tournament the three-time state champions have never won.

Well, that’s some dull reporting.

Let’s get to the part about Caylie Jones with the magic handles on that fast break.

With the Potters leading by 17 and seemingly nothing to worry about, here came Jones with the basketball, running free at midcourt. Ahead and on the left wing was Kassidy Shurman. The two of them ran at one poor defender back-pedaling in the paint. So what’s a girl to do in this case?

“I’ve told them that because they can’t dunk,” their coach, Bob Becker, said, “they need to do something fancy with the ball to get the crowd into the game.”

On a 2-on-1 break with a minute left in the third quarter, Jones had some fancy ball-handling on her mind.

“Summers in AAU, my dad is always telling us to do fancy stuff with the ball,” the Potters’ senior said. “So when I saw we were 2-on-1 . . .”

On the run, she dropped a behind-the-back pass to Shurman – just tapped the right side of the ball, really, sending it around her back to Shurman, who by then was under the hoop. The crowd in the Normal Community High
School gym didn’t catch on immediately. But the Potters’ bench did, everyone bouncing up in anticipation of Shurman’s layup.

Alas, the defender recovered and forced Shurman to get rid of the ball, and all was for naught as the possession fell apart.

Still, that daredevil moment was symbolic of the Lady Potters’ growing confidence as they near the regular season’s halfway point. On a nine-game winning streak, they are 12-1. They have won those nine games by margins of 23, 1, 27, 26, 15, 36, 18, 60, and 14. Perhaps the one-point, buzzer-beater victory over the Monroe Cheesemakers, a top-tier Wisconsin team, gave the Potters real reason to feel good about themselves. In any case, after tonight’s victory over a solid Normal West team, Bob Becker said words he loves saying: “We are being consistently excellent.”

Throwing out the 86-26 cakewalk with Chicago North Lawndale, the Potters yet are averaging 60.5 points in the streak while giving up 40.5.

Now, about deflections . . .

Deflections? You may ask, “Deflections?” I love deflections. A defender knocks away a pass. It messes up the other guys’ offense. It gives every defender reason to get serious. It makes every ball-handler wonder if they’ll ever complete a pass without interruption.

Yes, deflections. Coaches keep track of deflections because they show who’s really working on defense, sliding into passing lanes, anticipating the offense’s movements.

So, I asked Brooke Bisping, an assistant coach who kept track of such things tonight, “How many deflections for Lindsey?”

Lindsey Dullard is a 6-foot-1 sophomore best known for her shooting. She can drill it from downtown.

“Ten,” Bisping said.

“And five or six steals,” the coach said.

“And two blocks,” Bisping said.

This, then, is to introduce Lindsey Dullard, defensive prodigy. As the point on the Potters’ 1-2-2 full-court press, Dullard is a formidable obstacle.

“She’s using her length better and better,” Becker said. “She’s hard to throw around or over.” When the Potters’ pair of 6-footers, Dullard and Tenley Dowell, conspire in the press to trap a ball-handler, the ball-handler is in big trouble because as soon as she throws a pass out of that trap, if she can throw one at at all, it’s subject to theft by another Potter.

“I felt more confident on the defensive end tonight than on the offensive end,” Dullard said. Then she smiled as she said, “Defense kind of made up for my offense tonight.”

And when one of your team’s best shooters is liking her work on defense, a coach is liable to say what Bob Becker said of Dullard tonight: “When she blossoms, she’s going to be even more special than she has been.”

Journalistic responsibility requires that mention the Normal West fourth-quarter rally. Down 20, they cut Morton’s lead to seven at 52-45 with 2:05 to play. They did it mostly with driving layups that were contested poorly by Morton’s defenders. After that, Morton ended the game on an 11-4 run, mostly on Josi Becker’s free throws.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 17. Dullard and Josi Becker had 10 each. Courtney Jones scored 9, Shurman 6, Caylie Jones 4, Megan Gold 4, and Maddy Becker 3.

In 10 minutes and 21 seconds of the first half tonight, the Morton High School Lady Potters outscored Chicago North Lawndale, 48-0. At halftime it was 55-6. Game’s end, 86-26.

That set of bizarre numbers is not even the most bizarre thing about the Potters’ opener in the State Farm Holiday Classic.

The weird part came during pre-game warm-ups.

I’ve made a habit of watching the Potters’ opponents warm up. The star is usually easy to find. She’s an ego kid. She sets herself apart, perhaps by shoes that don’t match her teammates’, certainly by her cool, aloof swagger. The hardest part of my little game is deciding which five girls are the starters. Get three right, I give myself a B+.

Tonight, during North Lawndale’s warm-ups, I spotted all five starters of the Lady Phoenix.

I could attribute my A+ success to decades of keen-eyed observation of basketball players.

Or I could tell the truth and say North Lawndale dressed only five players from what once was a 14-player squad.

I’d never seen a game in which one team had only five players.

The Chicagoans’ coach, DeWan White, explained: “We had four young ladies who quit. Two other young ladies are injured. One has Lupus. And two are academically ineligible.”

So North Lawndale brought the surviving five to Bloomington-Normal to play four games in four days.

“I wanted to bring up some freshmen,” White said, “but their parents wouldn’t let them make the trip.”

Even early in the season, at full-but-quickly-declining strength, North Lawndale had its problems. It had lost 11 of its 12 games. And tonight its five players were asked to go against the three-time state champion Potters, who came in with 14 players and a 10-1 record.

The full measure of the mismatch was evident early. After North Lawndale tied it at 2-2, Morton scored the next 48 points. I won’t even tell you how they did it, other than to say the Potters were good at basketball in many ways. Example: Lindsey Dullard once finished an alley-oop play off a Josi Becker cross-court pass that she caught at the top of her leap and banked in. Meanwhile, North Lawndale was bad at basketball in all ways. Example: a Phoenix once put up a baseline shot that hit the back of the backboard, yes, it did.

Morton’s 36 points in the first quarter set a Holiday Classic record. Its 55 points at halftime set a record. Its 39 field goals for the game set a record. Its 86 points for the game were two short of the record.

Of Morton’s 14 players, 13 scored and the other, Olivia Remmert, missed such an easy layup that she was seen laughing halfway through the shot and laughing still as she fell to the floor. Dowell led the scoring with 25 (13 in the first three minutes). Maddy Becker had 10. Peyton Dearing and Courtney Jones each had 8. Dullard and Addie Cox had 6 apiece, Bridget Wood and Kassidy Shurman 5 each, Megan Gold 4, Kathryn Reiman 3, and 2 each by Josi Becker, Caylie Jones, and Claire Kraft.

Afterwards, I had one more question for the North Lawndale coach. What did he tell his five girls before the game?

“I told them to play hard, have fun, respect the game, and enjoy the game,” White said.

All that, they did.

I sought out Jamia Lockheart. She is a little guard who handled the ball 95 percent of the time against Morton’s pressure defenses tonight and led her team in scoring with nine points.

Two years ago, she was a benchwarmer on the North Lawndale team that defeated Morton in this State Farm tournament, 48-46, in four overtimes. That team then lost to the Potters in the state championship game, 58-41.

“Back then, De’Asa Almon made three buzzer-beater 3’s for us to win,” Lockheart said. Yes, Morton remembers those 3-pointers. Almon is a senior now, the one with Lupus. “Tonight was tough,” Lockheart said. “Morton’s a great team with a great program and even beating us like that, they showed good sportsmanship all night. They helped us up if we fell. It was tough, but it was fun.”

I stood with Lockheart outside the North Lawndale dressing room. Three of her teammates stood in the doorway, eavesdropping on the interview, cracking up at the sight of Lockheart, the star. When we finished, the teammates set up a raucous cheer. Turns out, apparently , it’s possible to lose by 60 and have fun.

That said, it’s more fun to win by 60, and the victory sends Morton into a second-round game Thursday night against Normal West at the Normal Community High School gymnasium. Game time, 7 p.m.

To see the bare score, 62-44, is to know nothing about the way the Morton High School Lady Potters defeated Canton tonight. To see an 18-point victory margin is to imagine a cakewalk. It’s to think the three-time state champions tossed their warmups onto the Alice Ingersoll court and the Canton girls fainted at the fearsome sight of the candy-striped laundry. For sure, during such a romp, the Morton coach, Bob Becker, would never need to raise his voice.

So who was that man standing in front of the Lady Potters bench? That gentleman casting a stern gaze on his players? That fellow with tendrils of smoke curling from his ears? Every coach has a burst-into-flames point, somewhere near 1020 degrees Fahrenheit, and this poor guy’s thermometer was at 911 and rising.

Well, yes. ‘Twas Bob Becker. It says here he had good reason to go hot under the collar. His team was blowing a big lead. And folks in the third row behind his bench heard the coach ask those players on the bench – they were his team’s stars – one question.

“Are you ready to play?” he said.

The inference, of course, was that they were on the bench because they had not played all night. They certainly played below their standards, let alone their expectations. Becker expects his team to dominate the first three minutes of any third quarter. Tonight those minutes belonged to Canton, and it seemed possible that the Little Giants, undefeated in nine games and playing before a raucous home crowd, might win this one.

When Becker asked that question, his team led 40-34. Twice it had frittered away big leads. His stars nodded yes, they were ready.

“Then prove it,” Becker said.

And he said it again, only this time in capital letters, “PROVE IT.”

Before reporting what they did given that ultimatum, I should say they had a chance to PROVE IT only because bench-warmers had come to the rescxue earlier.
It was 32-31 three minutes into the third quarter when Becker decided he’d seen enough of his starting five. He looked down his bench and sent every breathing soul into the game.

Well, not everybody. But he sent in three players who had not yet been in the game. He sent in Maddy Becker, Peyton Dearing, and Megan Gold.

First time she touched the ball, Maddy Becker threw in a 3-pointer from the right side. (In the jayvee game, the sophomore guard had scored 29 points.) After Gold forced a turnover, Becker made another 3, this one from the deep left corner. A fast- break layup by Lindsey Dullard made it 40-31. In one minute and 17 seconds, the Potters had outscored Canton, 8-0.

“Our bench gave us a big lift tonight,” Becker, the coach, said later. By game’s end, all 14 Potters had played, nine had scored and five had divvied up the team’s 10 3’s. Morton’s bench scored 16 points tonight.

So it was 40-34, Morton leading, when Becker sent his stars back into the game to prove they had come to play.

Prove it, they did. They went on a 19-3 run that produced a 59-37 lead with 4:04 to play.

It went like this:

The starters had been back in the game 13 seconds – 13 seconds! – when Josi Becker made a 3. An amazing in-the-paint pass from Caylie Jones then created a Tenley Dowell layup. With three seconds left in the third quarter, Josi Becker made another 3.

Fourth quarter: a Josi Becker layup, a Dowell 3, a Caylie Jones 17-footer, two free throws by Dowell and two more by Maddy Becker.

By then, Canton had capitulated. Its coach, Jessica Thum, removed her starters when it was 57-37. She later denied she did it because her players were exhausted (though they were) or because the game was out of reach (though it was) “I put in kids who usually play,” she said, although they had played only a few minutes tonight.

I asked her what happened to her team when it had moved within a point at 32-31 with 12 minutes to play, only to lose the rest of the way 30-13.

“We abandoned our game plan,” Thum said.

Canton’s game plan seemed simple. Put up 3-pointers and/or drive madly at the rim and hope to luck something in. At peak strength, that plan worked for Canton. Second half, ground to tremblings by Morton’s constant pressure at both ends, Canton’s helter-skelter dashes at the hoop became exercises in failure.

Thum was undismayed. As we sat in the bleachers afterwards, she said something that sounded like, “It’ll be a different outcome next time.”

I said, “What?”

“You can quote me,” she said. “It’ll be a different outcome next time.”

Playing unevenly, Morton had won on the road by 18 over a previously-undefeated team. So, yes, I guess the outcome could be different the next time. Morton might win by 25.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 17. Josi Becker had 16, Maddy Becker 8, Caylie Jones 6, and Dullard 4. Dearing, Kassidy Shurman and Courtney Jones had 3 apiece, Kathryn Reiman had 2.

This summer I wanted someone to dive off the high board at the Morton community pool with a basketball in hand. I asked three or four of the Morton High School Lady Potters if they’d volunteer for such a stunt. Only Claire Kraft said yes. She didn’t just say yes. She said, “YES!” She said, “I’LL DO IT!” She said it with enthusiasm suggesting, “Don’t you dare ask anybody else!”

So there’s a picture in my book about the 2016-17 season – “The Unbelievables” – of Kraft rocketing down a slide and flipping a basketball overhead. (She did the high board, too, but we liked the slide photograph more.) The picture captures the essential Claire Kraft. Even after an hour of high-board splashings before we went to the slide, she’s still smiling. The whole thing is a hoot.

I thought of that summer day with about a minute and a half to play in tonight’s 72-36 romp over Pekin at the Potterdome.

That’s when Kraft found herself with the ball at the top of the key. She was a foot behind the 3-point arc. Considering she’s maybe the 11th or 12th player on a 14-player roster . . .considering she’s a post player . . . considering a 3-point shot is the last thing she’s good at . . . considering she had scored two points this season, both on free throws . . . considering all that, it was memorable that the Potters on the bench rose as one, shouting, raising a ruckus, demanding that Claire Kraft put the rock up from downtown.

So she did.

“I was wide open,” she explained.

Alas, her shot was wide right. Airball.

Which caused her to smile and hustle back on defense. Such a hoot. To quote her teammate, Megan Gold, “Claire’s goofy, she’s fun, she’s light-hearted.” To quote her coach, Bob Becker, “If I’m mad at something in a game, I look down the bench to see Claire. I can’t be mad if I’m looking at Claire. She’s a great kid, just fun-loving.”

So, a minute later, the ball again came to Kraft, this time in the deep left corner, again a step outside the arc, and this time the bench wasn’t just cheering, people now were hopping up and down in anticipation of Claire Kraft’s first 3-pointer ever . . .

Even as Kraft held the ball in that corner, she knew what her teammates wanted. She was leaning toward the bench. She saw all nine of them, demanding she try again, and here’s what Claire Kraft did next . . .

She smiled, she laughed, and she passed the ball to someone else.

“I didn’t want to airball another one,” she said.

She could’ve airballed a dozen of them and done no harm on this night, for the Potters took the heart out of Pekin early and, to quote a country song, stomped that sucker flat.

After five minutes, Pekin led, 11-10.

Five minutes later, Morton led, 28-11.

That 18-0 run was built on defensive pressure that exhausted Pekin physically and psychically. Becker had put a note on his whiteboard: “Amped Up Def.” That, the Potters had. The last thing any Pekin player wanted was the ball. The ball became a magnet drawing two and three Potters to it in a mad rush to cause dicombobulation. The telling image of Pekin’s distress came early, less than six minutes into the first quarter. The Dragons’ star, Maddy Cash, bent double on defense. She clutched her shorts with both hands, resting until she remembered how to breathe.

The 18-0 run: Josi Becker a 3, Lindsey Dullard a 3, Dullard two free throws, Kassidy Shruman a 3, Peyton Dearing a 3 (notice a trend? The Potters had 11 3’s divvied among 7 players), Dullard a layup, Tenley Dowell a layup – all of this work done efficiently, confidently, and with ball movement, especially on the Dowell bucket, that reminded me of my second-favorite basketball team, the Golden State Warriors. It began with Shurman’s entry pass from the left arc to Caylie Jones on the left low block. Jones moved the ball three feet to Dullard in the paint. Dullard bounced it to Dowell on the right low block. Four passes done quickly and unhurried. Ball movement that left Pekin wondering what the hell just happened.

As if an 18-0 run wasn’t enough, the Potters did a 20-0 run to begin the second half – again with defense so good that Pekin made 12 straight trips without scoring. By then, the Potters led, 56-23.

Yes, yes. Pekin’s not much. A 20-0 run by the three-time state champions against an exhausted, not-much-good-anyway team is small reason to celebrate. Still, I saw one great reason: Tenley Dowell’s outside game is coming back. She made two 3-pointers in that killing run, the first time she has made two 3’s in a quarter since the season’s third game. Against the very best teams, Dowell needs 3’s to set up her slashing moves inside. After three straight games in which she hadn’t made a 3, Dowell now has made two 3’s in three of the Potters’ last four games.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 14. Josi Becker had 12, Dullard 9, Caylie Jones 8, Peyton Dearing 7, Kassidy Shurman 6, Maddy Becker and Bridget Wood 5 each, Kathryn Reiman 3, Courtney Jones 2, and Megan Gold 1.

Good basketball players can do things they didn’t expect to do when it’s the only way to do them. They invent stuff. It’s more than invention, actually. It’s doing something unusual in the only way it can be done. I’m thinking of a Courtney Jones shot.

It came early in tonight’s game, long before the Morton High School Lady Potters finished a 55-40 victory over a good, stubborn, physical Dunlap team that had lost only once this season.

Jones had the ball near the Potters’ low right block. The sophomore had her back to the baseline. As she stepped toward the lane, she put the ball in her left hand. She did that to keep her body between the ball and a defender. Then, to the defender’s surprise, perhaps even to Jones’s surprise, she put up a left-handed shot from that right side.

Awkward.

Except for one thing.

The ball kissed the backboard softly and fell into the net. Fouled on the shot, Jones then added the free throw.

Once behind 7-1, the Potters made it 7-apiece with Jones’s invention at 1:58 of the first quarter – and never trailed again as they wore down the host Eagles and earned their largest lead at game’s end. The Potters are now 8-1 for the season, 3-0 in the Mid-Illini Conference. Dulap is 6-2, 2-1.

For Morton coach Bob Becker, the victory was meaningful. He called it “a good win, on the road, against a sectional-level team playing with the most confidence they’ve had in a while.” He cited a Twitter poll – this is, after all, a social-media world – that had cast Dunlap as the favorite tonight.

Whether Becker mentioned the Twitter nonsense to his players, I don’t know and didn’t ask. I do know that when the Potters were down 7-1 in the game’s first five minutes, they responded with something like, “Oh, yeah? How many state titles you guys got?” Or, as Becker put it, “We played with a little bit of a chip on our shoulders.”

So the back-to-back-to-back state champions went on a 16-1 run.

The run began, auspiciously enough, with a Tenley Dowell field goal, the kind of hard-earned basket the Potters will need to win big games against tough teams – a Dowell creation off a slashing drive on the left side. In traffic against Dunlap’s strong inside people, the junior star put up a 10-foot jumper for the Potters’ first basket. The game was 5 ½ minutes old. Fouled, Dowell added the one.

Then came the Jones act of ingenuity for the 7-7 tie, followed by a Josi Becker full-court dash with a steal for a 9-7 lead at the quarter.

The Potters made the game theirs in the second quarter. Again, Jones was big. Fouled while going up with an offensive rebound, she made two free throws. It was 11-8, then, when Josi Becker made back-to-back 3-pointers go give the Potters a 9-point lead that never shrank to fewer than four the rest of the way.

I mentioned Jones on offense. She also did good work on defense. Dowell started on defense against Dunlap’s senior star, Kai Koehler, a Division-1 recruit. When Dowell picked up two early fouls, Jones moved over on Koehler. Through the game-defining first half that gave Morton a 25-17 lead, Koehler, under Dowell-Jones pressure, was 0-for-8 from the field and had two points. Bob Becker said, “Courtney gave us a big lift.”

Jones is usually the first Potter off the bench. Tonight she was one of seven or eight off the bench as Becker ran in substitutes strategically and tactically for the full 32 minutes. Asked about the frenzy of subs coming and going, the coach said, “We need to keep all 14 kids engaged. If we’re going to make a deep run in the post-season, and I think we can, all 14 will have to contribute.”

No news in that, for by “deep run” the coach meant he’s thinking of a run at an unprecedented fourth straight state championship by a girls program.

“We have the bar set up here,” he said, and he raised a hand over his head.

Dowell led Morton’s scorers with 22, Josi Becker had 18, Lindsey Dullard 6, Courtney Jones 5, and Caylie Jones 4.

On March 4, 2017, after his team’s shoot-around before it played that afternoon for a third straight state championship, the Morton High School coach, Bob Becker, gathered the Lady Potters at midcourt in the Potterdome. No matter what might happen in five hours, he said, “I love you.” And he said, “The highlight of my day, every day, is coming to practice and being with you.”

Tonight, nine months later, I reminded Becker of that moment and said, “Still true?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Forever.”

Then, with a smile, “It’s never been a job for me. It’s what I love to do.”

I didn’t expect much of a game tonight. It wasn’t. A 19-0 run across the first two quarters jump-started the Potters to a 60-34 victory over Limestone. So let’s talk first about Becker. This week, late to the party, the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association announced what most of us have long known. Robert Cantley Becker III is a Hall of Fame coach.

He has created teams with poise and guts. He preaches “consistent excellence” built on a culture of confidence and belief. He wants his players to move with “humble swagger.” He maximizes strengths, minimizes weaknesses. His teams master fundamentals. (That last-game morning of March 4 he had the Potters doing first-day ball-handling drills.) That mastery, limiting mistakes, allows Becker’s teams to put constant pressure on opponents at both ends of the floor. Now in his 19th season as the Potters’ head coach, Becker has become a superb in-game strategist and tactician.

Wait. Go back a couple paragraphs. He said the “love” word. It reminded me of my all-time favorite summary of the coach’s work. It came from his wife, Evelyn. (“The perfect coach’s wife,” the coach said tonight.) Evelyn Becker can tell you she gave birth to their daughter, Josi, on Nov. 21, 1999. That was the day after Evelyn watched her husband’s first Potters team won its first tournament championship at Eureka.

I had asked Evelyn if Bob liked basketball.

“He doesn’t like basketball,” she said. “He loves it.”

She counted the ways.

“He loves it all. The homework. The video watching, the strategizing, x’s and o’s, the scouting. He just loves the game. He loves basketball.”

Before Becker, the Lady Potters had not won a regional championship in 15 seasons. They had never won a sectional, and the idea of earning a trip to Redbird Arena for the state finals was the stuff of fools. After Becker, surprise moved to astonishment to the unbelievable. In the last 13 years, Morton has won 11 regionals. In the last 10 years, they have won six sectionals. Out of those six sectionals, they reached the Final Four five times. They finished fourth in ’07 and again in ’13 before winning it all the last three years.

Players keep showing up, thanks to Morton’s youth basketball program, the Heat, which has produced a line of talented athletes eager to become Potters. Those players work at the game through summers just as the high schoolers commit summers to AAU programs.

“We’ve got great parents, great players, and great coaches,” Becker said. “This team, these are the best kids a coach could have. They’re an elite group, academically, socially, on the court and off the court.”

Here are Becker’s career numbers: 422 victories, 145 defeats. His teams have won at least 30 games in a season six times and at least 21 11 times. They have had 15 consecutive winning seasons. In the last eight seasons the Potters have won 221, lost 28. The last three seasons and eight games this year, they are 107and 9.

Now, tonight’s game which moved the Potters’ season record to 7-1 and made them 2-0 in the Mid-Illini Conference . . .

One minute, 39 seconds into the game, Limestone led, 3-2.

Eight minutes, 48 seconds later, Morton led, 21-3.

That 19-0 run started with a Tenley Dowell floater in the lane and ended with a Dowell layup off a steal. In that run, Dowell scored 10 points her way to a game-high 18.

She had help in there. Kassidy Shurman swished a 3. Lindsey Dullard and Caylie Jones put back rebounds. Maddy Becker scored on a breakaway layup.

Soon enough, because one team was much better than the other in every regard, the score was 42-11.

By the game’s merciful end, 11 Potters had scored: Dowell 18, Shurman 9, Maddy Becker 8, Bridget Wood 5, Caylie Jones 4, Dullard 4, Josi Becker 3, Katharine Reiman 3, Olivia Remmert 3, Courtney Jones 2, Claire Kraft 1.

With three minutes to play, en route to a 64-37 romp tonight, Bob Becker suddenly remembered “Pickle.”

The Morton High School Lady Potters had practiced the play Friday and Becker had waited for the right moment to use it.

But all night against Bloomington, lost in his coaching bubble where nothing matters except what’s in front of him, the coach had forgotten about the special play created for this game.

So he called timeout.

He looked over the heads of his players on the bench. He looked up into the second row of the bleachers.

He called out to a girl there, “C’mon, Gaby, draw it up.”

Gaby Heer took a deep breath. She didn’t move. Maybe she couldn’t move.

“C’mon, Gaby, come down here,” the coach said.

Gaby Heer, a 7th-grader 13 years old, climbed over the varsity’s bench. She took the whiteboard from a coach whose team has won three straight state championships. Kneeling on the court, surrounded by Lady Potters paying attention, Heer used Becker’s Sharpie to make some X’s and squiggly lines that, if you know basketball, wound up looking like an out-of-bounds play.

Why did Heer name the play “Pickle.”

“I don’t know,” she said. (A year ago Becker said that same thing when I asked why one of his team important drills was called “Raytown.”)

“Pickle” was part of the deal the Lady Potters made with the Morton Community Foundation. The high bidder for a package called “The Potter Experience” would get to attend a team practice, meet the team in the locker room before the game, operate the spotlight for starters’ introductions, sit in the bleachers directly behind the team, and eat pizza with the varsity after the game. All that in addition to drawing up a play that the Potters would run.

A group of parents donated $400 to the Foundation. They helped make a memory for their 12 daughters, all 7th and 8th grade basketball players: Gaby Heer, Molly Shook, Abby Moore, Taylor Barnard, Abbey Pollard, Katie Davis, Julia Keith, Emma Skinner, Maggie Hobson, Paige Griffin, Paige Chapin, and Emma Fonseca.

Alas, “Pickle” didn’t result in an easy basket. But Becker took the blame for that.

“Honestly, I just forgot it,” he said. “We’d practiced it with the starters and they knew the play. But by the time I remembered it, we had reserves in the game.”

So “Pickle” got a little scrambled, as Coach Heer reported to the press later. “They didn’t set the down screen for the wing,” she said, and the press made a note reminding itself it’s not as smart as a 7th-grader.

Anyway, by then the Lady Potters had done enough things perfectly that the slightest of imperfections went unnoticed as they won for the sixth time in seven starts.

Bloomington scored the game’s first four points, but Morton scored the next 10 – five each in less than two minutes by Tenley Dowell and Lindsey Dullard. At quarter’s end it was 19-8, at halftime 32-15, and in the last minute of the third quarter it was 49-22.

The Potters did it with defense that reduced Bloomington’s offense to out-of-control drives and 3-pointers put up by people who had trouble scoring from under the basket.

The Potters’ offense left Bloomington in tatters. If not coasting in on transition baskets created by full-court pressure, they scored from long distance. From all points of the compass, they threw in 3-pointers, a dozren of them. Kassidly Shurman had 4, Dullard 3, Dowell 2..

Dowell led the scorers with 20, Shurman had 12, Dullard 11, Caylie Jones 6, Courtney Jones and Josi Becker 5 each, Katherine Reiman 3, and Bridget Wood 2.

Three times in the last minute and five seconds, the Morton High School Lady Potters came from behind and won tonight, 58-57, on a layup off an out-of-bounds play with :08.2 showing on the clock. Be still my heart.

Afterwards, in a cafeteria, the weary Cheesemakers, from Monroe, Wisconsin, scarfed up cheese pizzas, some with sausage and mushrooms, before boarding a bus for the three-hour ride to their little town eight miles above the Illinois border that calls itself “The Swiss Cheese Capital of the United States.” (Tasty. But I prefer“The Pumpkin Capital of the World.”)

What a game. Monroe had asked for it sometime last summer. The Cheesemakers reached the Final Four of the Wisconsin state tournament in March. They were looking for stern competition and discovered a virtual twin in the Lady Potters – school enrollments near the same, both with strong basketball traditions for a decade, both good last year and expected to be good this time. Morton came in with a 4-1 record, playing well only intermittently. Monroe was 4-0 and averaging nearly 70 points a game.

“They challenged us,” Bob Becker, the Morton coach, said. You don’t win three straight state championships, as the Potters have, unless you’re willing to take a dare from a school that won its state championship in 2006 and ’08 and reached the finals three times in the last eight years. So the teams met on a neutral floor tonight, at Illinois Central College.

To tell you the lead changed hands 16 times is to tell you nothing about the game’s beauty, as free-flowing as any high school girls basketball game you’ll ever see. Both teams played strong defense, moved well with and without the ball, contested every rebound, and played at a pace that left witnesses, if not themselves, breathless.

Three times in the second half, Morton led by 10 points. Each time Monroe stopped the Potters’ momentum. Still, with 3:14 to play, Morton led by seven, 52-45. That lead vanished in fewer than two minutes. Monroe went on an 8-0 run and led 53-52 at 1:21. The rest of it deserves play-by-play attention because every possession was fraught with possibility.

At 1:05, Tenley Dowell’s two free throws put Morton up.

At :40.6, Monroe took the lead back with two free throws.

At :28.8, pushed down by a defender, Courtney Jones rose to make two free throws to give Morton a 56-55 lead.

At :18.4, Monroe’s star, the junior point guard Sydney Hilliard, a Division-1 prospect recruited by five Big Ten schools, did a court-length drive through Morton’s defense for a layup and a 57-56 lead.

When Monroe’s defense slapped the ball out of bounds with 9.7 seconds to play, the Cheesemakers’ coach, Sam Mathiason, called his team’s last timeout.

In the Morton huddle, Becker told his team to run “24,” an out-of-bounds play that starts with point guard Josi Becker handling the ball on the right side of the lane.

Tenley Dowell is to set a screen straight out from Becker. Courtney Jones is to come around the Dowell screen. Becker is to bounce a pass to Jones for a layup.

But here, with the game on the line, the sophomore Jones had an idea.

“She told me to switch with her,” Lindsey Dullard said.

Jones explained: “If it works right, the layup is on the left side, and I’m right-handed and Lindsey’s left-handed, and she’s taller than me.”

So now Dullard is to come off the Dowell screen – if Dowell, in fact, can set an effective screen at the lane’s right side, which is a major question because her screen is to be set against Monroe’s biggest player, a 6-foot-1 senior with maybe 30 pounds on Dowell.

Given the ball, Josi Becker sees the play in movement. She sees Dowell succeed with the screen – and succeed so sensationally that she stopped the big girl in her tracks. Think, a truck running into a tree.

Dowell later said, “I…(here a smile)…NAILED her.”

And here comes Dullard running free . . .

“I passed it when I saw her come off the screen,” Becker said.

The ball arrives when Dullard arrives, undefended, and she goes up . . .

“I thought I missed it,” Dullard said, “but then I saw it go in.”

She laughed. “And I was happy. And I hurried to get back on defense.”

With 8.2 seconds to play, and out of timeouts, Monroe’s only hope was to fly downcourt. In the hurry, against Morton’s defense, the Cheesemakers lost the ball out of bounds near midcourt with :00.1 showing. Game over.

“A great game,” Bob Becker said. “Two teams playing great all night, a great crowd, and a buzzer-beater at the end, and we came out on the right side, so I can smile.”

After losing to Peoria Richwoods in the Thanksgiving Tournament championship game, Becker had said his team needed “to develop grit.”

Well, you may ask, what, exactly, is grit?

Let’s say your team builds good leads against a strong team but then it loses those leads. Yet it comes back to go ahead. And they do that more than once or twice. Let’s say they dot three times. And they do it all three times in the last minute and five seconds.

Such is grit.

Dullard led Morton’s scorers with 18, Dowell had 16, Caylie Jones 10. Becker had 5, Courtney Jones 4, Peyton Dearing 2, Megan Gold 2 and Kassidy Shurman 1.

Next year, by the way, Morton will make the drive to Monroe. I will be there, the good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

Same Old News: Morton’s Lady Potters beat Metamora again, this time 50-27.

New News: I can get to Metamora.

From my house, you turn left, right, left and right again to reach Rt. 117. There you go north in the night past cornfields emptied by monster combines. One will come at you raising a dust storm because its right-side wheels are off the road, and in the night’s blackness its blinking lights make it look like a scary Battleship Galactica. You roll through downtown Eureka and its snowflake Christmas lights hung with good cheer. Take a left at Rt. 116 past a farmhouse with Christmas trees downstairs and upstairs. In Metamora take a right on Lafayette Street down to Madison Street and the high school’s parking lot.

At last, after seven years lost in the Mid-Illini wilderness, I now can leave home and get to Metamora. I no longer worry about winding up in Roanoke. I no longer wonder if I should’ve gone left on Rt. 24 at Eureka’s town square. No, no, Christopher Columbus, that gets you to Washington. (I think.)

Anyway, $2 for a hot dog, $2 for water, $2 for a ticket and I’m in the fourth row in Metamora’s spiffy little gym. I’m such an old hand now – hey, I found the place! – I’m expecting to see what I’ve seen every year for seven years. By my count, the Morton High School Lady Potters had won seven straight times at Metamora. With seven more victories in the Potterdome, Morton came to this night having beaten Metamora 14 straight times.

Make it 15.

Morton 50, Metamora 27 was what we have learned to expect,which is to say we don’t expect much of a game because one team is usually better than the other in every respect. The only difference this time was that the Potters usually make their first Metamora game part of a season-opening winning streak, streaks that have reached 13, 11, and 14 in the last three seasons. But tonight the Potters came to Metamora off a 53-45 loss in their fourth game of the year, beaten by Peoria Richwoods last Saturday.

So how would the Potters respond?

They responded by pitching a shutout for a quarter. They led, 10-0, and Morton coach Bob Becker told his team, “Hey, great defense. Anytime you hold ‘em to zero, that’s pretty good.”

Meanwhile, the Potters’ full-court press left Metamora so frazzled it committed nine turnovers in that first period. Lindsey Dullard began Morton’s scoring 20 seconds in with a driving 6-footer. She followed with a layup created by a Tenley Dowell steal. Josi Becker made two free throws. After Dowell dropped in an 8-footer, she converted another steal into a breakaway layup.

It was 10-zip when, from my fourth-row seat, I noticed the Morton coaches laughing.

Shouting to their players simultaneously, they had called out different timing of a play to run at quarter’s end.

Becker: “Run ‘snap’ at 12 seconds.”

Davis: “Run ‘snap’ at 11.”

Becker looked at Davis, Davis looked at Becker, and they broke up. After 18 seasons together, they’re so much on the same page that when they disagree, they disagree by one second.

A desultory, poor-shooting second quarter left Morton with a 19-12 halftime lead. They came to life in the third quarter, beginning it with a 12-0 run. Caylie Jones started with a layup, Dullard followed with back-to-back 3’s (one from the deep left corner, one from the top), Josi Becker added another 3, and Dowell a free throw.

That 12-0 run was the kind of game-decider that was the signature of the Potters’ state championship teams the last three seasons. In less than 5 minutes, they’d thrown in 3 3-pointers that had Metamora reeling. It was, however, Morton’s only bright moment of the night offensively. A team with five or six good 3-point shooters managed only four 3’s against a team it has beaten 15 straight times and is likely to beat another 15 straight times.

Dullard led Morton’s scorers with 12, Dowell had 11, Josi Becker and Caylie Jones 10 each, Maddy Becker 5, and Courtney Jones 2.

Morton is now 4-1 for the season, Metamora is 3-3.

Sometimes I will make a note just to be sportswriterly. (A guy’s gotta earn his Milk Duds.) Most often the notes are early observations that are rendered meaningless by the game’s movement. But in the tradition of blind-squirrels-finding-acorns, sometimes a guy gets it right. Sometimes he is even prophetic.

In the Potterdome this afternoon, I made five notes at the end of the first quarter of the Thanksgiving Tournament championship game. These notes . . .

“Fast pace”

“R forcing action”

“R dominating physically”

“R attacking at both ends”

“Hell-bent”

Those notes came at the end of the first quarter. The Morton High School Lady Potters led Richwoods, 12-11. That lead was a mirage, for in the early going Richwoods was the faster, bigger, stronger, more aggressive team. Unless the Potters did something quickly to change the game’s tenor – say they began a rainstorm of 3-pointers . . . say their full-court press stole every pass . . . say they got every rebound of shots Richwoods missed – unless they made those events happen, trouble was coming the Potter’s way..

Well.

Trouble arrived.

It was a 53-45 loss.

The defeat ended the Potters’ 16-game winning streak built over two seasons. They last lost 10 months and nine days ago, on January 16. They won their final 13 games of the 2016-17 season and had won their first three this year in the two days of their Thanksgiving tournament. (They beat St. Thomas More, 67-39, this morning.)

The loss was also the earliest in a season in four years. The Potters opened the 2014 season by winning 13 straight. The next year, 11 straight. Last season, 14.

As foreboding as the early going had been for the Potters, they yet managed a 23-all tie at halftime. They’d done that largely thanks to mistakes by Richwoods’ big people inside. The 6-footer Jaida McCloud and 6-1 Camryn Taylor owned the paint, but they clanged as many shots as they made.

That changed quickly in the new half. In the first 3 1/2 minutes of the third quarter, McCloud and Taylor each scored twice from point-blank range. Richwoods moved ahead, 31-25, and stayed there. When the Potters made a little run to get close at 35-33 with 3 minutes left in the third quarter, Richwoods again asserted its dominance inside, Taylor scoring on two put-back rebounds and a free throw.

Richwoods’ lead grew to 40-33 with 2:10 to play in the third quarter.

“Game over,” a note read.

‘Twas.

In that third quarter, Richwoods scored eight field goals at the rim – six layups, two put-backs. Morton had three such buckets. For the game, Richwoods had 17 layups and rebound baskets to Morton’s 9 (two of the put-backs done, somehow, by 5-foot-3 Josi Becker).

Richwoods came in with a simple defensive game plan against the Potters.

“We wanted to limit them to two 3-pointers a quarter,” coach Todd Hursey said.

They did better than that. They did it, as Hursey said, with athletes who are “big, long, and athletic.” Their constant, hyper-quick, hands-everywhere movements on defense gave the Potters no time to square up on 3’s and forced the ball to the corners as often as not. After making 13 3’s in the morning romp over St. Thomas More, the Potters managed only 5 for 25 attempts against Richwoods – and none, zero, nada when it mattered most, in the game’s last 11 minutes.

Morton’s coach, Bob Becker, cast the defeat as a learning lesson that showed his team what it needed to work on. To match a team such as Richwoods, it would help if each Potter grew six inches this week, added 20 pounds, and learned to jump over people for offensive rebounds. With those developments unlikely, the coach would settle for what’s possible: “We need to develop grit.” Meaning: his team lost too many contests for rebounds, lost too many contests for loose balls1, and lost too many opportunities to make a late-game comeback.

Josi Becker led Morton’s scoring with 13, Lindsey Dullard had 11, Tenley Dowell and Caylie Jones 8 apiece, Kassidy Shurman 3, and Courtney Jones 2.

I once wrote a football game story in which I didn’t tell who won until the 11th fat paragraph. I was about to commit that literary crime again here. Tempted by one play that provoked a touch of amusement, I began typing away on it.

Then stopped.

C’mon, kid, tell who won.

Morton 55, Normal Community 49.

Morton 76, Champaign Central 29.

The Morton High School Lady Potters, three-times-running Class 3A state champions, began the 2017-18 season with victories on the first day of their Thanksgiving Tournament in the Potterdome. They play again Saturday morning at 11:45 against St. Thomas More, then play Richwoods at 5 in a game almost certainly for the round-robin championship.

Now, about that play . . .

Ever get into the middle of doing something wonderfully graceful that you’ve done a hundred times and on the 101st time you remember something . . . like, Oh, no, I forgot to send Aunt Mabel a get-well card . . . and right when you’re thinking about poor Aunt Mabel, you step in the dog dish, flip your scrambled eggs off the ceiling, and ker-rash on your keester? (Kids, ask grandma, she’ll tell you about your keester.)

Which brings me to Kassidy Shurman, who is a wonderfully graceful little senior guard for the Lady Potters. She is four times a state champion, first in the seventh grade, three times in high school.

She has the ball.

She is driving to her left.

She sees someone open, Courtney Jones, she thinks.

Being a nifty little ball-handler, Kass will slip the ball past a Champaign Central defender. She’s done this thing to bamboozled defenders a hundred times. Nothing to it. Could do it blindfolded.

Except this is the 101st time.

As she picks up her dribble and is about to make a simple bounce pass, Shurman realizes – no, no, she doesn’t have an Aunt Mabel — she realizes that if she passes now, it won’t work. She realizes she needs to take another dribble to close the distance.

But another dribble would be a double-dribble violation, so she can’t do that, and she can’t make the pass, and what she does is she takes an extra step or two, and while she didn’t step on a dog dish at any point in this fancy dance, and didn’t fall on her keester, she is called for a walking violation.

Well, what’s a girl to do in a situation like this?

“I had to laugh,” Kassidy Shurman said, which she did on the court and did again reliving the moment for a guy whose German grandmother told him long ago, “David, I’m going to tan your little keester.”

Of course Shurman had to laugh, for in fewer than four minutes the Potters had built an 18-1 lead over Champaign Central that would grow to 48-10 at halftime. It was 71-22 after three quarters. Here’s about all the more you need to know about this game . . .

The Potters played 13 people, 12 scored (Shurman had seven) and 12 got rebounds. Near game’s end I tapped an old friend on the shoulder, one row down from me in the bleachers, asking if she was ready to play because she might be able to score in this game.

“They called us ‘the 49ers,’” Joyce Domnick said.

Which meant?

“We graduated in 1949,” she said.

She still might’ve got a rebound.

If that game was the day’s comic relief, the Potters’ opener against Normal Community was high drama. It was easily the best 3A game you’re likely to see in November. It would be no surprise to see both teams go deep into the post-season.

That said, it’s noteworthy that Morton never trailed. It led at halftime only 25-20, but began the third quarter on a 14-3 run. Tenley Dowell scored on a driving layup, then added four free throws before Josi Becker threw in a 3-pointer, Caylie Jones finished a fast break layup, and Dowell hit a 3-pointer.

At 39-23, Morton seemed to have the game in hand.

It still led by 15 early in the fourth quarter. But as well as the Potters had played, they could not put away a quick, skilled Normal Community team.

Their 44-29 lead dwindled to 51-49 with 2:14 to play – meaning Normal Community had outscored the state champs 20-7 in 5 ½ minutes. Of those 20 points, 12 came from sophomore guard Maya Wong, whose two 3-pointers in the run gave her five for the day. (And five 3’s, it says here, is not likely to happen to the Potters again this season.)

By then running a delay offense to slow Normal’s momentum, Morton controlled the game’s last minutes. Dowell’s free throws – two with 27 seconds to play, and two more with four seconds left – closed the door.

Dowell, scoring from the arc and on slashing drives, led Morton with 26 points, 10-for-10 on free throws. Josi Becker was the only other Potter in double figures with 13. Sophomore Lindsey Dullard had five points in the first three minutes and none thereafter, yet was sensational throughout with nine rebounds and a defensive presence that accounted for five blocked shots and a series of deflections in full-court pressure and against Normal’s set offense.

The Potters’ game Saturday afternoon against Richwoods will be a strong test of another kind. Normal Community came with ball-handling skills and shooting. Richwoods comes with size, speed, and rebounding.

So cancel your Saturday afternoon plans.

Get to the Potterdome.

Joyce will be there, ready if needed.

Brian Newman, the Potterdome’s public address announcer, hit the words with a sledgehammer . . .

“And now . . . your . . . BACKKK! to BACKKKK!! to BACKKKKKK!!! . . . State champion Morton Lady Potters!”

And this was just an introduction during an exhibition, a practice session, really, an intrasquad scrimmage on a Red-White Night (or Cherry-Gray, if I must) a week before the Morton High School girls and boys begin their real basketball seasons.

Still, Newman was in mid-season form, more than once filling the building with his banshee-in-the-night cry celebrating a Potter shot made from beyond the arc, such as “Dowell, a threeeeEEEEEEEEEE!”

I liked every ounce of Newman’s energy, and I also liked the small, subtle, silent announcements high on the back of the Potters’ jerseys.

Under a line that read “State Champions,” there were these numbers . . .

2015
2016
2017

For all that, what I liked most is what I saw of the Potters on the court. The question the coach, Bob Becker, is asked most often is: Four in a row?

Once upon a time, Becker dreamed of getting a team to Redbird Arena. Then his team won a state championship, which was amazing. Then it repeated, astonishingly. And three-peated last year, which is why my third book in this unbelievable trilogy is entitled “The Unbelievables.” (The book is available at Eli’s, Potters’ home games, and at Mortonladypotters.com. Christmas is coming.)

As to what I saw – I saw good reason to think a fourth straight championship is possible.

I mean, why not? Yes, the Potters lost an all-stater, Brandi Bisping, a Division-1 recruit, the team’s fiery, combative heart. And they lost Jacey Wharram, a formidable, veteran force inside.

But one thing I’ve learned in watching the Potters for seven seasons now is that high school players are so young that with every passing year they become practically different people. They grow up. They get stronger in every way, mentally and physically.

So we might expect Tenley Dowell, a junior, to be more than she was last season, when she was sensational. Already four or five D-1 universities have her in their recruiting sights. Lindsey Dullard, a sophomore, grew in confidence at the end of her freshman year – and I’ve now seen her in a full-scale practice game against a pick-up team of high school boys, and I’ve seen her in last night’s scrimmage – and I can say it won’t be long before people who came to see Dowell will also take note of Dullard.

They’re both 6-footers who can shoot the threeeEEEEE!

“We’re going to score this year,” Becker has said.

And by that he means score a lot, which may be necessary because without Bisping and Wharram the Potters’ defense and rebounding may suffer. The good news is that he has a team of shooters. Four of the likely starting five – Dowell, Dullard, Josi Becker, Kassidy Shurman – are 3-point threats at any stage of a game. The fifth, Caylie Jones, is a good mid-range shooter.

Becker has been pleased with practices so far. “A great week,” he said after the Potters’ very first week. His only concern is building depth. He went eight deep last year. Right now, with Courtney Jones as the sixth man, Becker is looking for people to step up for the important seventh and eighth man roles.

Becker’s admitted search for depth tells you all that you really need to know about the Potters. Most high school girls teams are lucky to have two good players, one outstanding. To have three starters back from a state championship team, with three key reserves back from that same team, is to have an embarrassment of riches. To be worried about who’s your seventh and eighth man . . . well, that’s to be worried about very little, indeed.

Look at this. Out of habit, I started keeping notes of the first team’s scoring last night. In seven minutes of the first quarter, each starter had scored: Dullard from 15, Dullard a 3, Dowell a layup, Shurman a layup and free throw, Caylie Jones two 12-footers, Dowell a 3, Josie Becker a layup, Dowell a 3. It was 22-4.

They open at the Potterdome the morning after Thanksgiving. They’re ready.

Magically, it happened without him believing it had happened. Even when it had been made real, he couldn’t believe it was real. From hundreds of students came a chant, “THREE-PEAT . . . THREE-PEAT,” and even then Bob Becker walked in small circles, head down, as if searching for proof that, yes, it had happened. The Morton High School Lady Potters coach could be heard whispering, “You dream of just making it here . . .”

Here, Redbird Arena.

Here, where they play for the state championship.

Here, where today the Potters won a state championship for the third straight year.

Becker had coached the game of his life. When a coach was all that separated victory from defeat, he was a master. When it was over, when Morton had beaten Rochester, 43-37, for the Class 3A championship, Becker hugged each of his players, all 13, one by one. He had called them “smart” and “tough” and “resilient,” and they were all of that today when they most needed to be all of that.

Now the coach walked in small circles on the Redbird Arena court, no one with him, a man in a dreamer’s walk.

Close enough, you could hear him.

Whispering . . .

“Unbelievable.”

Might as well call this team The Unbelievables. All around Redbird, celebration. Becker found his wife, reprising an embrace they shared in March of 2015 when he whispered to her a rookie’s version of the words whispered by an old master today: “I can’t believe it.” Fathers wept with daughters. Benchwarmers danced with stars. As players and coaches stepped onto a small stage to accept medals, the students’ chant began anew, “THREE-PEAT … THREE-PEAT.” It’s not a Super Bowl and it’s not a World Series and it’s not LeBron defying gravity. It’s better. It’s 13 small-town girls making memories. They held high a big trophy that forever will bear their names: Brandi Bisping, Jacey Wharram, Josi Becker, Kassidy Shurman, Tenley Dowell, Caylie Jones, Lindsey Dullard, Courtney Jones, Olivia Remmert, Megan Gold, Bridget Wood, Clarie Kraft, Maddy Becker.

They’ll come home to Morton today for a parade that begins at the Farm & Fleet store and winds it way through town to the high school. At 1 o’clock there’ll be a public reception for the team at the Potterdome. At such a reception a year ago, assistant coach Bill Davis first said aloud, on the public address system for all to hear, the word that became this team’s goal: “Threeeeeeee!”

How bold a goal that was, and how boldly the Potters rose to it – even in today’s game, or, I should say, especially in today’s game. Rochester was strong, quick, and experienced. It was good at both ends, the best 3A team the Potters played all season. Morton led at halftime, 16-15, but had been unimpressive.

During halftime warmups, Becker called Brandi Bisping over. He wanted to know what his senior all-stater thought of his locker-room decision to go a trapping 1-3-1 zone press. “If the leader buys in, everybody buys in,” Becker said. Bisping had bought in immediately. “It was a good idea,” she said, “to give Rochester something they hadn’t seen.”

Quickly, Caylie Jones made the decision work. Her diving steal of a Rochester dribble gave Morton a jump-ball possession that Jones herself cashed in with a 17-foot jumper. Then, anticipating a lazy Rochester pass, Jones stole the floating thing to set up a Tenley Dowell 3.

Morton’s lead was four points, 21-17 – but, as suddenly as it was built, it was lost. Rochester went on an 8-0 run in 86 seconds. It led 25-21.

At that point, I scribbled a sentence on the Potters’ side of my notebook and put an asterisk by it as reminder of a moment that can turn a game . . .

“*How tough are they?”

The Potters had fought to take a 4-point lead, then lost it in half the time it took to build it. Some teams might find that dispiriting. For some it could be killing. I’d seen the Potters be tough all season, and I’d heard Becker proclaim their heart and resiliency and “burning desire to succeed,” and I’d seen him write on his coach’s whiteboard a pre-game reminder: “TOUGHNESS.” But that was against inferior opposition. This was against the best team they’d played all season with the state championship at stake.

So how tough are these Potters, really?

Unbelievably tough.

They scored the game’s next 12 points.

They took the battle to Rochester. They dared to shoot 3’s. Brandi Bisping moved outside and put up her first long one of the game. She made it. “Nobody came out on me, so I shot,” she said. Thirty-two seconds later, she did it again. Bold now and running hot, the Potters dared to be physical. We saw Bisping pumping both fists in celebration while flat on the floor after drawing a charge. Out of their press, the Potters stole the ball, forced bad passes, and drove Rochester to distraction. By the time another Dowell 3 opened the fourth quarter and gave the Potters a 33-25 lead, the Morton students had recognized what was happening. They chanted, “I BELIEVE WE WILL WIN . . . I BELIEVE WE WILL WIN.”

A couple minutes later, I made another asterisked note . . .

“*Becker manage the game?”

Hah. He hadn’t won 414 games in 18 years by being a potted plant on the bench. Before Becker, Morton girls basketball was nothing special. Now, in his 18th season, it is extraordinary. His teams have won 415 games. In the last three years, Morton has gone 33-3, 33-3, and 34-2. Do the math: it’s 100 victories, 8 defeats. Following the Potters’ 56-41 semifinal victory on Friday, a Chicago Tribune headline reported that Chicago Simeon had fallen to “Mighty Morton.”

Here’s how Becker managed the game when it most needed management . . .

Morton’s lead was 35-30 with 4:07 to play when Becker began a series of situational substitutions. When he needed ball-handlers, he sent in Lindsey Dullard and Jones. Defense, he sent in Kassidy Shurman (against a 3-point shooter who didn’t scored on her) and Jacey Wharram (against a post who got one shot, scoring only down 7 with 14 seconds to play).

Ten times in the last four minutes, Becker made those platoon substitutions. Rochester moved to within 36-33 but never closer.

Bisping led Morton’s scoring with 17 (and 11 rebounds). Dowell had 12, Dullard and Jones 5 apiece, Josi Becker 3, and Wharram 2.

And now that these 13 girls have done what no small-town girls had ever done, the question becomes . . .

“Can you win it again next year?” I asked the sophomore Tenley Dowell, who raised her chin a click, smiled, and said, “Yeah!”