Author: Dave Kindred

Some nights you got rhythm, some nights not so much. For the Morton High School Lady Potters, tonight was one of those not-so-much’s. Two plays in the Potters’ 50-33 victory at Metamora are illustrative.

Play 1: Somehow, Metamora scored the first 11 points of the fourth quarter to cut Morton’s 17-point lead to 36-30. About then, the Potters decided something needed to be done. Working from a man-to-man press, the littlest Potter, 5-foot-2 ½ guard Kassidy Shurman, stood on her tippy-toes and then rose even higher to slap the basketball out of a Metamoran’s hands. She chased it down near mid-court. She then saw Josi Becker filling a right-side lane. A quick pass to Becker, a layup, the start of a 9-0 run, and order was restored to the universe. At 45-30 with under three minutes to play, Game Over.

Play 2: A beauty, this was. In the game’s last minute, Shurman had the ball near mid-court. The Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, shouted, “Back cut!” Josi Becker, perhaps hearing dad’s order, ran a back cut down the lane’s left side. Shurman bounced a perfect pass through traffic that Becker caught on the run and in the same instant bounced a pass across the lane to Jacey Wharram on the low block. No movement of the ball could have been executed more swiftly. Wharram’s layup was a cinch. Alas. Not so much a beauty. The ball rolled out of bounds.

So it went on a night when the Potters did a few things well and a few more not so well. Down early 11-5, Morton went on a 17-2 run for a lead it never gave up. The run featured three 3-pointers – by Shurman, Becker, and Lindsey Dullard.

Even that run was symbolic of the night’s goings-on. The Potters are a good perimeter-shooting team, averaging almost 8 3-pointers a game. Still, they had serious trouble against Metamora’s 2-3 zone. Outside of that 17-2 run, they made only one other 3; they were 4-for-14 from outside in the first half, 0-for-5 the second. Then there was the rebounding. All-stater Brandi Bisping played much of the game in her second outing after a bout of mononucleosis. Still, the Potters scored on only one rebound while Metamora had three put-backs. Most telling, too often for too long, the Potters’ offense never moved with the daring and freedom that so often has allowed it to dictate a game’s action.

Ah, maybe I’m picking nits. It’s January, not late February. It’s the state’s No. 1-ranked Class 3A team against a Mid-Illini Conference mediocrity. Some nights are magical, some are snores. Anyway, a win is a win is a win. Wins are always nice, however achieved, and the Potters are now 17-1 for the season and 8-0 in the Mid-Illini. And it’s especially nice to win at the other guys’ place, even if you do remember that five weeks ago you had that same team down by 30 at your place with two minutes to play.

“We’ll take road wins,” the Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, said, content with the 17-point victory three nights after winning by 18 at Washington.

Tenley Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 13. Shurman had 10, Becker 7, Wharram 6, Bisping 5, Caylie Jones 4, Dullard 3, and Courtney Jones 2.

Here, a confession . . .

Oh, no, is what I thought when I saw the Metamora kids walk into the gymnasium.

Six, all carrying drums.

Oh, no, another pep band, is what I thought.

The drummers climbed to the top row, and then came the brass, trombones and trumpets, all those noise-makers climbing up the bleachers, except for the tuba guy who apparently gets a doctor’s slip excusing him from climbing steps while carrying heavy objects.

Oh, no, is what I thought because I am in trouble with pep bands for having written that Washington High’s pep band, a year ago, performed with all the rhythm and subtlety of a train wreck in your living room.

And here came Metamora High School’s pep band.

And guess what?

It saved the reputation of pep bands everywhere, for the Redbird pep band first played the Star Spangled Banner with grace and dignity, and throughout the game played music recognizable as music, played it at appropriate times at appropriate decibel levels, and, most blessedly, sat silent when silence was called for.

There is a God.

What happens in some games is that the other people think they have a chance against the good team until, suddenly, they don’t have any kind of chance and never did have a chance, really, because the other team is better in ways that turn bad nights into OK nights and OK nights for good teams are better than the other team’s wish/dream/hallucination that it has a chance.

Sorry about the run-on sentence. But some games are like that. They run on and on. They don’t tell us much about either side. And when it’s blessedly over – the Morton Lady Potters 49, Washington 31 tonight – what happens is we don’t have much to say about the game, except, perhaps, to thank whatever gods may be that the Washington pep band took the night off rather than commit its usual crimes against music. Other than that, we could go to the record book and find some interesting numbers.

Such as: 82 and 7.

And: 397.

After back-to-back seasons of 33-3 and with tonight’s victory raising their current record to 16-1, the Lady Potters have won 82 of their last 89 games.

The 397 is Bob Becker’s victory total in this, his 18th season, as the Potters’ head coach. With three more games this week, Becker’s 400th could come Saturday against U High at the Potterdome.

Washington’s idea it might have a chance this night came midway through the second quarter. Morton led only 14-12. The last-place team in the Mid-Illini (1-4 coming in) was only a bucket behind the state’s No. 1-ranked Class 3A team and conference leader (6-0). It’s usually true that it’s then OK to imagine an upset. Morton, for one, well remembers being 20 points down and losing by two to East Freakin’ Peoria last season.

But that was then, this is now. Next thing Washington knew, Morton’s 14-12 lead had become 37-16. In little more than eight minutes of game action, the Potters outscored their hosts, 23-4. There was a certain inevitability about it. The Potters had shot so poorly early that even a small improvement would create separation that, once established, would dishearten Washington’s day-dreamers.

The improvement was not small but substantial. At 14-12 the Potters had made only 5 of 19 shots. Worse, they were 1 of 9 on 3-pointers. But in the eight game-turning minutes, they made 6 of 8 long ones. The little junior guard, Josi Becker, made 4 of them, including two quick ones opening the third quarter. Courtney Jones made one with 7 seconds to play in the first half, and Kassidy Shurman capped the 23-4 run with a 3 from deep in the left corner at 3:44 of the third quarter.

The best news for the Potters was the return of Brandi Bisping, their all-state senior, back after missing five games to recover from mononucleosis. While Bisping was out of sorts — she put up two 3-pointers that missed most everything, was called for four fouls, and scored only a point – she soon will be ready, just as Becker suggested of his team in the dull wake of tonight’s victory: “We will be on an upswing.”

Some other numbers: 9 and 131.

That’s 9 3’s tonight, by 5 different players.

And 131 3’s for the season, an average of 7.7 a game, nearly 24 points a night.

Josi Becker and Tenley Dowell led the Potters’ scoring with 14 apiece. Jacey Wharram and Lindsey Dullard had 6 each, Courtney Jones and Shurman 3 each, Caylie Jones 2, Bisping 1.

Wait. Go back. How good is 82-7?

Well, here are things I have done 89 times.

I have set mouse traps. I have eaten chili while wearing a white shirt. Throughout last summer, I insisted the Cardinals could catch the Cubs.

And how often has it worked out for me?

Mouse traps, I get ‘em done about half the time without finger-snapping fright. Keeping chili off my shirt, the only hope is a bib. The Cardinals, I now know, will not catch the Cubs until the summer of 2020, if then.

So 82-7 is pretty good.

Some nights the game doesn’t much matter. The score was 90-33, the Lady Potters over somebody named East Peoria. What mattered most was that the Potters made it Brooke Bisping’s night by retiring her jersey.

Never more than 5-foot-7 and yet often playing inside, Bisping is still the Potters’ all-time leading scorer seven years after graduation. Her name decorates the record book everywhere from rebounds to 3’s to steals. She is only the third Lady Potter whose jersey now hangs in the Potterdome, there with Cindy Bumgarner and Tracy Pontius. In thanking her parents, teammates, coaches, and God, Bisping declared herself “honored” and “blessed.”

Even after the current back-to-back state championships, some people believe the Potters’ 2006-07 team was the program’s best. Bisping was a sophomore on that team led by the four-year starter Pontius, a sensational scorer and ball-handler who went on to star at Bowling Green University. It’s telling, then, that Pontius counts herself lucky to have been in Bisping’s company.

“She was a great all-around player and a deadly 3-point and free throw shooter,” Pontius told me. “It was great to watch her grow as a player and become more confident in herself. I had faith in her to make the big shot we needed or get the steal we needed at critical times. She was a great player and an even better person. She is the type of person who would do anything for you.”

To study up for the proceedings, I tracked down a video tape of Bisping as a junior. I had never seen her play, save for a single game her senior year. On the tape – a game against Limestone for a regional championship in ’08 – Bisping does the remarkable thing of playing remarkably without doing anything remarkable. Translation: she did everything well. She made no turnovers. She played stand-your-ground defense. She missed no shots. (Literally. Perfect from the field, perfect at the line, 25 points in a 64-39 victory.) As she ran to the bench with victory assured, her face was aglow with a smile born of work well done in a game her team won. You gotta love that girl.

Now, back to tonight’s game . . .

Had the people from the eastern banks of the Illinois River been good at any one basketball thing, this might have been a game. The East Peorians were bad at every basketball thing. Worse for them, they were bad on a night the Potters were impenetrable on defense, unstoppable on offense, uncatchable on the run, and double-damn dogged in pursuit of every loose ball, as in an early-game moment in East Peoria’s end when . . .

Josi Becker dove under an East Peoria girl – maybe the girl with a broken nose (we’ll get back to her in a minute) . . .

And Becker didn’t really grab the ball while skidding on the court, but . . .

She had her hands on it solidly enough to scoop it toward Kassidy Shurman, who . . .

Spotted Tenley Dowell sprinting away and tossed the ball downcourt so quickly that . . .

Dowell dropped in a layup before Becker, who’d started the whole thing, got untangled from the East Peoria girl.

And so it went for the Potters all night long in the 90-33 victory that was nowhere near as close as the score might indicate. Such can be said of few 57-point victories. But this was one of those few. Had it been 119-3 it would have come as no surprise to anyone who knows there’s air in the Wilson.

The Potters’ 90 points were their most in at least the last seven seasons. (They had 85 against Bloomington a year ago. Their record is 96 against East Peoria in 1990.)

With five different Potters contributing, they made 13 3-pointers. Josi Becker led the scoring with 22, Dowell had 14, Caylie Jones and Shurman 12 each, Bridget Wood 9, Courtney Jones and Jacey Wharram 8 each, Lindsey Dullard 5.

The Lady Potters are now 15-1, East Peoria is 3-12, and maybe you, though not I, can imagine the basketball skills of three teams bad enough to have lost to East Peoria.

“Redemption night,” said my neighbor in the bleachers. She remembered that East Peoria defeated the Potters last season, 37-35. For centuries that game will live as one of the universe’s mysteries. It was one of Morton’s three losses in its state championship campaign; at one point the Potters trailed 25-5. After that game, the winning coach refused to talk to me, apparently on grounds that I had insulted her and her cheap-shot team the year before. My neighbor rooted for a 60-point victory while I would have been happy with a greater margin, perhaps the difference between 119 and 3.

Earlier here I mentioned the East Peoria player wearing a transparent mask, held against the head by straps, usually to protect a broken nose. My neighbor noticed that mask, too. In fact, at one point as I grocery-listed the ways in which the East Peorians insulted the game of basketball, my neighbor said, “But you do have to give them props for the Hannibal Lechter mask.”

Wait, the third girl from the end? Walking with the Morton High School Lady Potters toward the locker room. Is that Brandi Bisping? She’s supposed to be home, resting in recovery from mononucleosis. I catch a glimpse before the girl disappears into the shadows. I ask the Potters’ assistant coach, Brooke Bisping, “Did I just see your sister here?” We’re at Illinois Wesleyan University’s basketball arena where the Potters would play for the State Farm Holiday Classic championship.

“Yes,” Brooke says.

“She’s supposed to be in bed,” I say.

Brooke laughs. “We told her she could come under two rules: No yelling and no hugging.”

Five seconds into the game, Brandi Bisping is yelling.

“Let’s go, red!” she yells, red being the Potters’ uniform color on this night against Rock Island.

She’s yelling from the bench because she’s there as a civilian, wearing team warmups, having made a plea deal with her father for a one-night pardon from the couch at home. She wanted to come to the tournament’s first game. He said no. The second. No. And no to the third. “Then I told him if the team got to the championship game, I was going to go,” she said. “He said, ‘Agreeable.’”

Alas, it was a largely disagreeable game Friday night. Rock Island won, 60-40. So ended the Potters’ 14-game undefeated streak this season and their 27-game winning streak reaching into last season’s state championship run. Twenty-point defeats are decisive but they are dispiriting only if the losers never had a chance. Morton, a Class 3A school, had its chances against a big, strong, quick, once-beaten team at the top of the state’s Class 4A ratings.

Midway through the fourth quarter, Morton had reduced a Rock Island 14-point lead to nine at 47-38. By then, as in the tournament’s first three games, the full measure of Bisping’s absence was evident. Where the all-state senior excels – rebounding with bear-trap hands, scoring on power moves at the rim – the Potters failed too often. Such failures were not necessarily fatal had bounces gone Morton’s way. But this night, when a ball on the rim might have decided to fall into the net, it fell the other way. Too many times under the boards, with the ball there for the taking, Morton’s fingertips allowed it to fall into Rock Island’s hands.

The Potters’ Kassidy Shurman cut Rock Island’s lead to 47-38 with her third 3-pointer of the game. The clock showed 4:55 to play, not much time but time enough if, suddenly, a team can do well what it had done poorly all night. Instead, Morton’s defense gave up five quick points on plays that bedeviled them in their first three tournament games, each won by three points.

Fouled taking down an offensive rebound, Rock Island first made a free throw. Then it scored on a layup, a girl dribbling across the paint, low, curling through Morton’s interior defense. Finally, a Rock Island guard drove from the top of the arc, twice taking the ball between her legs on a zig-zag sprint to the hoop that no Potter could stop.

The lead was 52-38 with 3:21 to play. Game over.

Shurman led Morton’s scoring with 9. Tenley Dowell, named to the all-tournament team, and Caylie Jones, who did fine defensive work on Rock Island’s star, had 8 apiece. Josi Becker scored 6, Jacey Wharram 4, Lindsey Dullard 3, and Courtney Jones 2.

With his players in the locker room afterwards, the Morton coach, Bob Becker, did a little speech of reassurance that all is well. Aside from the rebounding problems – “It’s something to work on, and we will” – there were positives to take from the week. Eleven of Becker’s 13 players are underclassmen. Some played under big-game pressure in a big arena for the first time. What happens in December is important, Becker said, but what matters most is what happens in February and March, state tournament time.

“At 14-1 we’re a really, really good team,” Becker told the players. Yes, it would have been nice to win the Holiday Classic. But a two-time defending state champion that has announced its hopes of a three-peat can live without a Classic trophy. “Our goal,” he said, “is to get back and win the big one.”

He also spoke to Brandi Bisping, seated cross-legged on the locker room floor.

“You,” he said, smiling, “go home and sit on the couch.”

A note of historical import: On this date two years ago, December 30, 2014, the Potters made their only other appearance in the Holiday Classic championship game. They lost by 25 to U High. Sixty-seven days later, on March 7, 2015, they won the state championship.

Behind with two minutes to play, twice behind in the first overtime, and twice more behind in the second overtime, the Morton High School Lady Potters defeated U High, 42-39, in a semifinal of the State Farm Holiday Classic tonight and damned if I can tell you how they did it because what they did was somehow bring order out of chaos when chaos surrounded them, such as in this moment . . .

It’s 40-39, Morton.

Second overtime, the clock reads :11.9.

U High has another offensive rebound and is going up for an easy bucket to win the game, and a guy next to me in the bleachers goes, “Oh, God . . .”

Not exactly a prayer, but . . .

U High misses that point-blank, game-winning shot, and then . . .

In the chaos of battle for the rebound of the missed shot, the ball gets batted around, here, there, everywhere, off U High’s hands, off Morton’s fingertips, until it is rolling loose out by the free throw line where . . .

A U High player has the ball, only to lose it between her feet, and if there’s anything these Potters like, it’s a loose ball between a girl’s feet, especially with time disappearing, because a loose ball with a game to win is signal for them to throw themselves at it, to dive between the girl’s feet, to knock her down, pin her flat, everyone going elbow over tea kettle, Lindsey Dullard there, Tenley Dowell, Courtney Jones, Lord knows who else, and then . . .

A jump ball is called.

Possession to Morton at :04.7.

Two seconds later, fouled on the in-bounds pass, Dowell makes two free throws, giving the sophomore star 24 points for the night, 11 coming in the fourth quarter and two overtimes.

In-bounding at :02.6, U High manages only a 60-foot heave at the buzzer, a prayer unanswered.

And in the Morton locker room afterwards, coach Bob Becker tells his Potters what he thinks of them. He tells them what he thinks of girls who came from behind five times against a previously-undefeated team. Girls who have won their three Classic games by three points each night. Girls who threw themselves after that loose ball. But before I tell you what he thinks of those girls I should tell you those girls loved every word of it. The coach told them, “You are the toughest little shits in the entire state of Illinois.”

Hell, maybe in Indiana, too.

The victory, moving Morton into Friday night’s championship game against top-seeded Rock Island, was the Potters’ best this season. It came against a very good U High team that had won 13 times. Perennially strong inside, the Pioneers dominated the boards. They had 16 offensive rebounds; at least twice they up four shots in a single possession. Their defense was tenacious and for long periods of time Morton could not manage a decent shot. While some of that was attributable to good defense, clearly the Lady Potters are a lesser team at both ends without all-state senior, Brandi Bisping, out for a third straight game with mononucleosis.

Until the game’s final moments – in regulation and in both overtimes – there wasn’t much to recommend it. You could take your pick as to why the game was a snore so long. Perhaps the defenses were so sensational that neither team could score. Or perhaps the offenses were so poor that neither team could score. I come down on the latter. Without Bisping, Morton could get nothing done in the paint. Without anyone who could drop the ball in the ocean from a rowboat, U High could get nothing done from outside.

But all that desultory play was forgiven in the chaotic fun near the end of regulation and in the two overtimes. Here’s how Becker’s TLS’s came from behind six times in a game that his daughter, point guard Josi Becker, described as “nerve-wracking . . . a fun game . . . I love that kind of game”:

1. The Potters scored the last basket in regulation time at 1:47, a driving layup by the 5-foot-3 Becker through everyone bigger than her, for a 28-all tie.

2. Down 30-28 in the first overtime, the Potters went ahead on a 3-point shot by Dullard at 2:38.

3. Down 32-31 in that overtime, they tied it on Dowell’s free throw at :13.7.

4. Down 34-32 in the second OT, they tied it again on Becker’s driving shot. It’s not enough to call that thing a layup. It was more of an amazing, flying, running, curl-it-into-the-air hook shot lofted over those bigger people and high off the board. “I don’t know how that went in,” she said, smiling a winner’s smile. Could she even see the basket? “I was staring at the rim all the way.”

5. Down 39-38 in that second OT, Becker stole a U High pass and worked the ball to Dowell, whose slash to the basket gave the Potters the lead with :24.6 on the clock. (A digression here: However long Bisping’s absence becomes, the Potters already have shown they can play well. Dowell has assumed the role Bisping played when all-stater Chandler Ryan went down last season. In the 13 games following Ryan’s ACL injury, Bisping averaged 18 points a game. This time, with Bisping sitting out three games, Dowell has scored 17, 14, and tonight’s 24, an average of 18.3.)

6. Finally, let us give solace to the poor U High girl who lost the ball between her feet in the game’s final seconds and looked up to discover half the village of Morton arriving with malice aforethought.

Small wonder, then, that Bob Becker declared himself “giddy” after this one. His Potters had shown “the grit that we’re all about.” His girls were “fighters” whose “toughness separates them” from other teams. He said, “I’m blessed to coach this group.”

If it goes in, it’s overtime. It it doesn’t, the Morton High School Lady Potters win. Thing is, the ball hangs in the air. A 3-pointer from the left corner by a good shooter and the ball hits the far side of the rim. Great, it’s no good. But wait. The cursed ball bounces straight up. It might still fall in. The buzzer sounds, the backboard lights up red, game over. No. Wait. Not yet. The ratzenfratzin’ ball is high in the air, seemingly directly over the basket. It’s easy, if painful, to imagine the ball coming straight down and denying the Potters a victory they had earned tonight by coming from behind in the game’s last two minutes.

“It was an awesomely designed play,” the Morton coach, Bob Becker, said. “They got the ball to their best spot-up shooter. Then, oh, my goodness.”

About an hour later, give or take a few oh-my-goodness minutes, the ball descended on the far side of the basket.

Morton 35, Wheaton Warrenville South 32.

The victory moved the undefeated Potters, 13-0, to the semifinals of the State Farm Holiday Classic where they will play undefeated U High, 11-0, at 8:30 tomorrow night. You know the Potters’ numbers by now: 26 straight victories reaching back to last season’s state-championship run and 79 victories in their last 85 games. As good as those numbers are, Becker may like a smaller number more: 2-0. On back-to-back nights his team is 2-0 against good teams, winning by three points each night without all-stater Brandi Bisping, who is at home resting in recovery from mononucleosis. With a sigh, Becker said, “We’ve been tested.”

Let’s go to the videotape of tonight’s test. Let’s go first to the Potters’ littlest big girl, Kassidy Shurman. After opening the season with about umpteen consecutive missed 3-point shots, the 5-foot-2 ½ guard made four tonight just as she had made four the night before, causing Becker to say, “Kass is on fire. Even through that 0-for-18 or whatever, we’ve never taken the green light away from her.” Shurman’s two biggest 3’s tonight came in the opening minutes of the fourth quarter. They broke a 23-all tie and put Morton up, 29-23.

Let’s go now to the game’s last two and a half minutes. Whatever bad happened earlier – such as the Potters going scoreless for nearly 13 ½ minutes, including the full second quarter against an impenetrable 1-2-2 zone – was long forgotten in the heroics of crunch time.

With 2:20 to play, Wheaton Warrenville led, 32-29 before Tenley Dowell scored Morton’s first basket in the three minutes since Shurman’s second 3.

At 2:03, Josi Becker stole a pass and sprinted in for a layup – only to miss the shot. Worse, teammate Lindsey Dullard fouled on the rebound.

Remember those names, Becker and Dullard. The last two minutes of a basketball game are filled with opportunity for redemption. Players who find ways to redeem their mistakes are winners. Becker and Dullard will find ways.

First, Wheaton Warrenville missed the front end of its bonus opportunity on the Dullard foul. That gave Morton the ball with under two minutes to play. Against that formidable zone, Dullard moved without the ball from side to side on the baseline. One of the Potters noticed Dullard wide open under the basket. “I saw her, but the ball was on the other side,” Courtney Jones said.

Dullard is a freshman. So is Jones, who has played a dozen games of varsity basketball, usually the third girl in off the bench. And in the last minutes of a tight game, one freshman noticed another freshman wide open under the hoop and made a decision.

“When I got the ball,” Jones said, “I looked to see if Lindsey was there.”

Yes, she was. And Jones threw a strike to Dullard.

“Lindsey kind of bobbled it,” Jones said. “But I knew she’d make it.”

At 1:34, Dullard dropped in the layup. Morton led, 33-32.

At :20, Wheaton Warrenville made a mistake of the kind that separates winners from losers. It allowed a ball-handler to get trapped in a corner, surrounded by three Potters, one of them Josi Becker. When the ball-handler tried a desperate pass to escape trouble, Becker intercepted it. Again, as earlier, she sprinted downcourt. But this time she did the smart thing, stopping, backing away from pressure, killing time in those last game-deciding seconds.

Two pieces of drama were to come. At :09.7, Dowell was fouled. She had made four straight free throws in the third quarter, but they had come much earlier without the game on the line. After she made the first to raise Morton’s lead to 34-32, Wheaton Warrenville called timeout, perhaps thinking to jangle Dowell’s nerves.

But the sophomore has been there, done that. Last season, with a sectional victory to be taken, Dowell made two free throws and later confessed that, on a nervous scale of 1-10, she was “I think a 7.” Now faced with the timeout and a second free throw, an odd thing happened.

As she came to the line, referee J.D. Coleman told her, “Number 10 is shooting.”

Dowell is number 1. She said, “No, it’s me.”

The referee laughed and flipped her the ball. “Just kidding,” he said.

Dowell smiled and then made the second free throw for a 35-32 lead. As a measure of a sophomore’s increased confidence under pressure, she said her nervous number this time was smaller. “A 4,” she said, “maybe 5.”

Up by 3, Morton had the game won – unless someone went crazy and threw in a 3-pointer at the buzzer. That wouldn’t happen. Would it? That shot wouldn’t hit the rim, fly above the backboard, and come straight back down. Would it?

Never a doubt.

Dowell led Morton with 14 points, Shurman had 12, Dullard 7, and Caylie Jones 2.

About 7:15 p.m. tonight, there surely came a  sickly little “whoooop” from Brandi Bisping. It would have come in celebration after she read a text from her father reporting that the Lady Potters had won their opener in the State Farm Holiday Classic, 62-59 over Normal West.

Bisping was stuck at home in Morton. She has mononucleosis, diagnosed over the weekend. She is likely to be out for a month. It is all but impossible to imagine the warrior Bisping staying in bed when a battle is at hand. So, an hour before tip-off at Bloomington’s Central Catholic High School, I had a question for her father, Todd:

“Did you have to handcuff her to a water heater or something?”

“Oh, she wanted out,” Todd Bisping said. “Yesterday she had dressed for practice and I wouldn’t let her go. Today she told me, “You can’t make me NOT play.” I said, “Between me, Coach Becker, and the doctor, I bet we can.”

Mono calls for complete rest. Part of the danger is an enlarged spleen, which, if ruptured, can cause death. That’s why doctors advise/order/demand that mono patients avoid contact sports until the infection is past. Bisping can play basketball with great finesse. She also plays with great enthusiasm, as when she realizes something good has happened and she goes, “WHOOOP! WHOOOP!” Most important to know in these mono days, Bisping also plays with small regard for corporal punishment, including her own. For the 5-foot-11 all-state senior more than for most high school girls, basketball is not only a contact sport, it is a collision sport.

So while Bisping was wrapped safely in blankets at home, unbeaten Potters won their 12th game of the season, their 25th in a row reaching back to last season’s state championship run, and their 78th in 84 games. Unlike the previous 11 victories this season, achieved by margins of 15 points or more, tonight’s came hard. Without Bisping’s scoring, rebounding, defensive mastery and on-court command of her team’s movements, the tournament’s second-seeded Lady Potters had a long, anxious, and scary night against the number 15 seed, Normal West, a 5-5 team.

Morton was beaten badly in departments it usually dominates. For one, Normal West scored six put-back field goals to Morton’s zero. For another, the Potters’ defense failed to shut down Normal West the way it has shut down everyone else. In addition to the six put-backs, the losers scored 11 more buckets daring the Potters to stop them driving to the rim. That’s 17 field goals from point-blank range to Morton’s 10 (with 7 of those coming in the first quarter when the Potters sprinted to a 19-5 lead).

Happily for the Potters, they can score from everywhere. They made 9 3-pointers (giving them 94 for the season). Morton’s biggest little player, 5-foot-2 guard Kassidy Shurman, had four of the long ones. She also had the two most important 3’s. They came early in the fourth quarter after Normal West had moved within a point at 46-45.

With 5:18 to play, Shurman made a 3-pointer from the left corner to make it 49-45. Fewer than 30 seconds later, again from the left side, she threw in another 3 for a 52-45 lead. That seven-point margin was good for four minutes until Morton seemed to lose its poise under pressure and allow Normal West to tie it at 58 with 26 seconds to play.

Nine seconds later, the Potters’ 5-foot-3 Josi Becker found herself in foreign territory, stuck with the ball in the paint. She did about the only thing that made sense. She shot it. From 12 feet. She made it. Normal West had a chance to tie with two free throws with 6.9 seconds to play, but made only one. With 5.7 seconds left, Tenley Dowell’s two free throws gave Morton reason to breathe again.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 17. Shurman had 15 (13 in the second half), Lindsey Dullard 14 (all in the first half), Josi Becker 8, Courtney Jones 4, Caylie Jones and Jacey Wharram 2 each.

Tomorrow night the Potters play Wheaton Warrenville South, 7 o’clock, at Normal Community High School.

No suspense again tonight, the Lady Potters 64, Canton 28 — unless you count as suspense the time Brandi Bisping’s shot rose to the edge of space and floated straight down to Earth . . .

It began with Bisping sprinting at full speed, slowing only for the nano-second she needed to gather for the long shot . . . Flying past midcourt by a step maybe . . . I say “maybe” because it happened so fast I’m not sure of anything except two things . . . Thing One: When the ball left Bisping’s hands, I looked up at the clock and it showed :00.8 . . .Thing Two: By the time the ball fell from the sky and through the net – nothing but net, nothing but that sweet silky song sung by a perfect shot – by then, still running, Bisping had reached the free throw line and here’s what she did when she heard her song – she jumped like a little kid on Christmas morning, dancing on air, jumping once, twice, three times. And then she began running again, off the floor, straight into the locker room. Bo Jackson once did that for the Raiders. Steph Curry did it last year for the Warriors. This one, I loved more.

Bisping came to tonight’s game sick. A virus, she hopes. She’ll have tests later this week to rule out mononucleosis. She missed practice Monday. The Lady Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, has a team rule. If you miss practice the day before a game, you can’t be in the starting lineup. So Bisping watched most of the first quarter. Not that the Potters missed the all-stater, running up a 15-0 lead and causing Canton’s coach, Layne Langhoff, to say, “You’re in trouble when you’re down 15-0 and their best player is coming in.”

Playing little more than half the game, Bisping led Morton’s scoring with 17. After the mid-court shot, she made two more 3’s. It’s necessary here to say that the facts are the facts and the facts understate the truth of Bisping’s performance. The truth is in these notes from the first four minutes of the second quarter . . .

BB, jump, ball trapped under her back…BB dives, bats to Maddy…BB rips out of C hands…BB put-back, 7:19…BB power LU, 6:05…BB takes chg, 4:25.”

Unless you have seen Bisping play, those notes might as well be hieroglyphics painted on King Tut’s sarcophagus. But those of us lucky enough to know Bisping’s manner will understand. The sportswriter’s shorthand notes show the 5-foot-11 senior was, again, as always, an unforgiving warrior at both ends – or, to quote her, “Pretty good for a sick girl.”

All of Bisping’s good, even sensational stuff, was of a piece with the Lady Potters’ full-game performance. As good as they were in 15-0 sprint out of the gate, the Potters were better in a 19-2 run that included Bisping’s mid-court shot and stretched three and a half minutes into the third quarter.

They ran a 26-16 lead to 45-18 – mostly because Becker sent his team into a full-court press that rendered Canton helpless. That press featured a front line of Bisping, sophomore Tenley Dowell, and freshman Lindsey Dullard. They go 5-11, 5-11, and 6-1, and they have arms that reach forever. Becker’s assistant coach, Bill Davis, a hockey aficionado, calls those long, tall girls the “Condor Line.” Unless you were a Canton fan, it was amusing to see Canton’s girls think they could throw a pass OVER or even THROUGH the Condor Line. In the first 3:37 of the third quarter, Morton outscored Canton, 14-2.

Dowell began it with a fast-break, Josi Becker added two free throws, Kassidy Shurman a 3, Bisping two free throws and a 3 of her own, then Becker two more free throws.

There 45-18. Game over.

Canton came in with an 8-3 record and is probably the second-best team in the Mid-Illini Conference. The Potters rendered Canton helpless and are now unbeaten in 11 games. They are winners of 24 straight going back to last season’s state championship run. They have won 29 straight at the Potterdome and have won 77 of their last 83 games, enough to move the losing coach, Langhoff, to superlatives.

Talk about happy faces, look at Jacey Wharram’s. She’s running off the court. She’s smiling and she’s laughing and she’s aglow. I shouldn’t ask ou look up a word. But look up a word. Look up “incandescent.” Jacey Wharram, incandescent, is sprinting toward the Lady Potters’ bench, and she’s flying past her teammates, slapping hands in celebration, and she hears Brandi Bisping.

Bisping is shouting. “Dude, you got 19 rebounds!”

Hardly slowing down, Wharram is shouting. “How MANY?!?”

BB: “Nineteen!”

JW: “Don’t be lying to me!”

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so I asked her father, once a college player, when he last had 19 rebounds in a game.

“Never happened,” Jed Wharram says.

And then I asked her mother, once a college player, when she last had 19 rebounds.

“Maybe if you add up two or three games,” Julie Wharram says.

The other Wharram girl, Jadison, the combative soul of the Lady Potters’ state championship teams the last two seasons, is home from college on Christmas break. Two rows up in the bleachers at Pekin High School, she waits to see her kid sister come out of the locker room. And then Jadison bends down to wrap a big ol’ hug around Jacey’s neck.

Yes, the Lady Potters had themselves some fun tonight. They whipped up on Pekin the way they’ve whipped up most everybody. The score was 70-34. The undefeated Potters have won 10 straight this season and 23 in a row reaching back into last season’s state title run. They scored 70 for the first time in their last 34 games. And still no one this season has scored more than 40 against them. The Potters’ average margin of victory is now more than 25 points, 56.7-31.4.

It’s not true that Jacey Wharram, a 5-foot-11 senior, got every rebound for the Potters. It just seemed true. As with all good rebounders, on this night she established inside position and kept it until, inevitably, the ball came to her. The 19 rebounds – the other Potters had 13 – were the team’s individual high across the last five seasons, two more than Bisping had on Jan. 17, 2015. In addition, Wharram scored 12 points. She achieved the double-double the rebounders’ way: three put-back buckets and six straight free throws.

As to how Wharram got all those rebounds, she said, “I guess nobody boxed me out.” No, no, too modest by half. Pekin’s failings may have had a little to do with Wharram’s big night. More likely, her 19 can be accounted for by citing a rebounder’s greatest asset – as when Wharram mentioned a rare rebound that slipped away. “In my heart,” she said, “I got them all.”

Again, as in the Potters’ nine previous games, this one wasn’t much. Morton is eight-players deep when its Mid-Illini Conference opponents are happy to be two-deep. It was close for a while in the first quarter. But the Potters then went on a 29-5 run that brought them from 13-11 down to 40-18 up midway in the third quarter. In that run, Wharram scored 8 points and Kassidy Shurman 6 while Bisping, Tenley Dowell and Josi Becker all had 5.

Oddly, that game-deciding run began with a technical foul call that I, for one, had never seen before – and it turned out to be a mistake. This takes some explaining.

Because the Potters often substitute two or three players at a time, it’s possible to wind up with too many players, or too few, on the court. At 2:53 of the first quarter, Morton’s coach, Bob Becker, sent in two subs. But three players came out. That left the Potters with four players on the court against Pekin’s five.

When Becker realized the mistake, he told Dowell to get back on the court. As soon as she jumped back into play, near midcourt, not even close to anything going on, a referee at the far end saw her and called a technical foul on Morton.

Becker argued that he had the right to send out a fifth player.

The referee said no, no, “She can’t just walk in the game.”

Becker said, “Show me the rule.”

Well. Put a man in zebra stripes, he don’t need no silly rulebook, he can make it up as he goes. So the zebra man gave Pekin two free throws and the ball. The free throws put Pekin ahead, 13-11. Coincidence, karma, whatever – that’s when the Potters began that 29-5 avalanche that buried Pekin.

And lookie here. Look at the rulebook. “10.2.4 SITUATION B” says that a coach who finds his team with four players on the court can order a fifth into play. “RULING: No technical foul is charged to A5 (the fifth player). A5’s return to the court was not deceitful, nor did it provide A5 an unfair positioning advantage on the court.”

Of course, some people already believe Morton has “an unfair positioning advantage” in that it has really good players playing really well and maybe it would be a good idea if the Mid-Illini passed a rule saying the Potters MUST play with four players instead of five to give other teams a chance.

Until then, the Potters will continue to play at a high level at both ends of the court. With 10 more 3-pointers tonight – by five different players – Morton has made 78 3’s this season – meaning it is averaging 23.4 points a game on 3’s. Defensively, look at these numbers: The Potters have played 40 quarters. They have held opponents to fewer than 10 points in 24 quarters, giving up an average of only 5.5 points in those hope-killing, spirit-killing, game-deciding quarters. Pekin, for instance, scored three points in the second quarter tonight and six in the third as they fell 30 points behind.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring tonight with 14. Josi Becker had 13, Wharram 12, Bisping 11, Lindsey Dullard 8, Shurman 6, Caylie Jones 4, and Courtney Jones 2.

Breaking News: The popcorn machine did it again, jangling nerves.

Breaking News, Part Two: The Lady Potters also did it again, jangling Dunlap’s nerves, 54-37.

I arrived at the Potterdome just before 5 o’clock tonight. A front door was propped open. People inside were fanning smoke out of the building. Two home games in a row now, the popcorn machine has not just popped corn, it has set it on fire. Or at least caused it to smoke enough that alarms sounded, lights flashed throughout the school, and, in the fourth row of the bleachers, the coach’s wife said, “Not me this time.”

This time Evelyn Becker had an alibi. This time, unlike the first time when someone forgot to put popcorn oil in the popper, the coach’s wife was nowhere near the popping machine. This time Evelyn sat in the fourth row of the bleachers. I’m her alibi. We were talking about candy-striped pants. She had pointed out two small children across the way. “Bob’s mother made those warm-ups for Josi and Maddy,” Evelyn said. So a long time ago, Bob Becker, the Potters’ coach, may have had in mind this season when both daughters would play for him.

Winnowing the accumulated clothes of girls growing up, the Beckers gave the candy-stripes to Deidre Ripka, an assistant principal at Morton High. She put them to good use. Her daughter, Izzy, 7 years old, and son, Andy, 6, were the most stylishly dressed kids in the Potterdome tonight. Evelyn couldn’t remember how old Josi and Maddy were when they first wore the stripes. “But I’ve got a picture somewhere,” she said. And that she did, as you may have noticed attached to this story. I love it.

There’s a rule in life as well as in sportswriting. If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with, y’know, bullfeathers. Thus, those few words on the infernal internal-combustion popping corn conflagration contraption. Not to mention a few words on candy-striped satins created by the coach’s mother, Connie. Still, there comes a time when a guy must earn his Milk Duds by typing sentences about the basketball game. So here:

1. I yawned. It was early in the third quarter, Morton led, 33-17, and Dunlap had scored eight straight points, exciting some Dunlap folks. Not me. I yawned. I knew what would happen. I’d seen this movie before.

2. What happened was the Potters went on a 14-2 run in 4 minutes and 57 seconds. At the end of three quarters, it was 47-19.

3. The Potters are playing so well as to make decent teams look helpless. Undefeated and winners of nine games in a row, their narrowest margin of victory is 15 points. Their average victory margin is 24 points, 55-31.

4. Here’s how they’re doing it. The Potters’ offense is as relentless, opportunistic, and versatile as it is careful, patient, and resourceful. It can score on the run, from sets, from outside the arc and inside the paint. It is eight players deep, which matters against decent teams and will matter a lot against really good teams. The Potters’ defense is simple. It drives people bats. Either in man-to-man contesting every move and/or pass or in a scrambling zone trapping everywhere, the defense has not yet allowed more than 40 points in a game. It is, too, eight players deep, a very good thing at all times.

This one was over, really, in less than three minutes. The end came at 5:13 of the first quarter. Ahead only 4-3, the Potters were throwing the ball in at their end. The great old coach, Hubie Brown, is famous for his clinics, some of which have him talking for three hours about in-bounds plays. I don’t think the Potters needed Hubie’s help on this one. Someone tossed the ball in to Brandi Bisping in the deep right corner. She caught it and shot it. A three. Morton led 7-3. They could have stopped then.

It certainly was over 2 minutes and 22 seconds later. By then Bisping had scored five more points, on a put-back and a powered-up drive with a free throw added. Morton led 12-3. Yawn.

Bisping led Morton’s scoring with 18. (Here’s a laugh. Late in the game, a Dunlap player went to a referee to complain that when she cut through the paint, Bisping bumped her off stride. Yeah, so? As Pat Summitt often said, “Suck it up, buttercup.”) Tenley Dowell had 11 points. Talk about eight-deep offense, four players had 5 points apiece: Josi Becker, Lindsey Dullard, Courtney Jones, and Kassidy Shurman (who had a sensational ball-handling night, five assists, no turnovers). Caylie Jones had 3 points, Olivia Remmert 2.

Breaking News, Part Three: Before leaving the Potterdome, the assistant principal Deidre Ripka spoke with a woman who said the school plans to replace the thing. She said, “We’ll have a new popcorn machine before the next home game.” Evelyn Becker must be relieved.

The last place Kassidy Shurman wants to be is under the basket. There are big people there. She is a little one, a charm on your charm bracelet, 5-foot-2, or “5-2 1/2 in my basketball shoes.” So what happens tonight? The Lady Potters are flying on a 4-on-1 fast break. Shurman is shuffled under the basket, on the low block, left side. And not only is she lost from sight among all those big people, she is stuck with the ball. What to do now?

Next thing I saw, the ball popped up from wayyyyyy down below, rose wayyyyy high, kissed the board and fell in.

Ace reporter that I am, I turned to my neighbor and said, “What happened?”

“Left-handed, too,” a reliable source reported.

From somewhere very near the very hardwood itself, using her off-hand, forcing the solitary Limestone defender into a foul, Shurman had twisted in the night’s most improbable shot. With the free throw added, Shurman’s three points followed a Tenley Dowell 3-point shot and sent the Lady Potters on a 21-0 run that guaranteed a victory over Limestone High. The final: 50-34.

Before that run, in fact for most of the first half, the Potters had turned one of their signature strengths, unselfishness, into a turnover-producing liability. They seemed to make one too many passes on every other possession. The last pass would be too cute by half, someone thinking that a clever pass would work when the right pass was one not made at all. Credit should go to Limestone’s defense as well. Of Morton’s first six field goals, four were 3-pointers – a sign that the Potters couldn’t move the ball inside.

Limestone had taken the first-half lead four times, last at 20-19 with 2:30 left in the second quarter.

Before the game, Morton coach Bob Becker had written five lines of pep talk on a whiteboard at the bench:

REBOUND
ATTACK
BE THE AGGRESSORS
TOUGHNESS
COMPETE TOGETHER

Down 20-19, the aggressors’ attack began with the Dowell 3-pointer and Shurman’s magic act. Josi Becker added a layup and Dowell followed with a 15-footer to end the half, Morton now leading, 29-20.

Then it was Brandi Bisping’s turn. Morton’s defense switched from its first-half man to a 1-3-1 zone, sending Limestone into confusion. On offense, Bisping sent Limestone into defeat. She scored the second half’s first 11 points in less than 3 ½ minutes. First came a 3-pointer at 7:28, then a put-back of her own missed 3-pointer at 6:14, followed by two free throws at 5:39, a power move inside at 4:28, and a fast break layup at 4:00.

The 21-0 run took only 6 minutes and 3 seconds. Morton had come from 20-19 down to 40-20 up. Game over.

Bisping led Morton’s scoring with 18. Josi Becker had 11, Dowell 7 (back from that ankle sprain, limited in movement but playing well), Shurman 6, Lindsey Dullard 3, Caylie Jones and Megan Gold 2 each, Courtney Jones 1.

Updating the numbers: the Potters, now 8-0, have won 21 straight reaching back to last season’s state championship run and 27 straight in the Potterdome. They have won 74 of their last 80 games.

**

A happy note on Chandler Ryan, the Potters’ all-stater now a freshman at Florida Gulf Coast University: Her recent knee injury did not require a second ACL surgery. Scar tissue was removed. She will resume workouts and may play in a month or so.

**

Because the boys’ teams played the second game – it’s an annual Morton-Limestone agreement – there were more than the usual number of people in the Potterdome tonight. Among those new people were members of the Morton High dance team and the boys’ team cheerleaders, four or five dozen dancers and cheerleaders in all. The Morton boys won, 61-38. It was a nice game. Not a Lady Potters game, but nice. Those new people should come out more often.

The Morton High School Lady Potters won again tonight, at Bloomington, leaving the Purple Raiders beaten, bruised, and breathless, 68-40. The two-time defending state champion Potters did so many things so well, even sensationally, that any curmudgeonly scribe worth his box of Milk Duds is obligated to balance his report by listing all the bad things the Potters did.

The ponytail moment, for one. Late in the game, from my bleacher seat three rows behind the Potters’ bench, I saw Kassidy Shurman – it may have been Josi Becker – fiddling with her ponytail. It had come loose. Of all the bad things in girls basketball, a wild ponytail is high on the oh-no-this-is-bad list. Happily, before anyone called 911, Kassidy, or Josi, found a tie and had the ponytail arranged for further warfare.

There was Tenley Dowell’s footwear. She went through pre-game drills and was on the bench, ready to play, wearing her customary red sneakers. But coming out for the third quarter, she wore flip-flops. I’m thinking LeBron could play in flip-flops because LeBron could play blind-folded on one bare foot. But for a girl who sprained her ankle five days earlier – that’s Tenley – flip-flops were a risky choice. Of course, Tenley had no plans to play. “I wore the real shoes just to warm up,” she said.

To extend the silliness, let’s add the basketball-as-greased-pig thing. At the Morton end, the ball bounced off a Potter’s hands. It rolled across the paint. Bodies threw themselves in tangled-limbs pursuit, three or four Potters landing on the poor thing. Somehow, and I think I heard it squealing, the ball escaped. It ran toward the free throw line. From there, only a NASA satellite could have traced the ball’s movements. All I know is it wound up in Brandi Bisping’s hands. (Sooner of later, every loose ball winds up in Brandi Bisping’s bear-trap hands.) I heard her coach, Bob Becker, shout, “Power!” Bisping powered it through someone’s face. “And one!” Becker shouted, meaning Bisping was fouled, giving her a free throw, her 21st and last point of a double-double night in which she had 14 rebounds.

Undefeated in seven games, winners of 20 straight going back to last season’s state title run, and winners 73 times in their last 79 games, the Potters never gave Bloomington even a suggestion of hope. Less than three minutes into the game, Morton led, 9-0. The first seven points were scored by Dowell’s replacement in the starting lineup, freshman Lindsey Dullard. In her first varsity start, Dullard scored the game’s first seven points, all in 58 seconds – a 3-pointer at 7:12, a fast-break layup at 6:50, and a mid- court steal for another breakaway bucket at 6:14.

That Dullard fast-break layup at 6:50 – it began extraordinarily. It began with a rebound by Bisping, which isn’t the unusual part. Bisping had been knocked down under the Bloomington basket. She sat in the paint, as if at a picnic. And here came the ball, falling toward her as surely as that 17th century apple fell to earth in front of Sir Isaac Newton. Except where Sir Isaac just watched, Bisping snatched the basketball from gravity’s grasp. She flipped it to Dullard, who did the rest.

I suppose Bloomington might have considered itself in the game for a while. Though they trailed 20-9 after a quarter, the Raiders scored the second quarter’s first seven points to move within four at 20-16 with 5:57 to play in the half.

But Morton ended that consideration quickly. It went on a 12-0 run in the next three minutes and nine seconds.

First, Josi Becker made a 3-pointer. Then she made another 3 from near the same spot, at the arc’s right shoulder. Caylie Jones followed with a nifty drive down the right side of the lane, scoring with a soft hook off the board. Bisping raised the lead to 32-16 with a damned-if-I’ll-quit put-back of her own interior miss and, a half-minute later, a layup created by the Potters’ perpetual-motion offense.

Five minutes later, the Potters’ lead was 20 points on its way to 30. Game over.

Bob Becker’s list of good things: “First game on the road, good road win, we’ll take it.” “Great balance offensively. Three in double figures, another close, most points we’ve scored in a long time.” (Most in 32 games, since a 71-35 victory over Champaign Centennial on Dec. 28, 2015.) “We had Bloomington worn out in the second half.”

Bisping’s 21 points led the Potters. Josi Becker had 14, Dullard 12, Caylie Jones 8, Jacey Wharram 6, Shurman and Courtney Jones 3 each, and Maddy Becker 1. Nearly half the Potters’ points came on 3-pointers; five players divvied up 10 3’s.

One thing more. Tenley Dowell, in sneakers, will practice this week and is likely to play Friday against Limestone in the Potterdome. How much she plays depends on how the ankle reacts to practice. Bob Becker said, “If she can go hard for two hours . . .” Well, if she can go hard for two hours less than a week after that sprained ankle, it would be cause for the curmudgeon scribe to mumble, like, “Ah, to be young again.”

She’s thin and she’s a teenager and she looks light. So the coach, Bob Becker, decided to pick her up and carry her. He wouldn’t just help her get to the locker room, letting her lean on his shoulder and hobble along. No, the coach picked Tenley Dowell up, half of her, anyway, with assistant coach Megan Hasler taking the other side.

“Wow,” the coach said afterwards. “Heavier than you’d think.”

“She is tall,” Hasler said, leaving unsaid the truth that a 5-foot-11 sophomore who has played basketball forever comes with an athlete’s body, all bone and muscle, all weightier than anything Big Macs can do for you.

By game’s end tonight – Morton’s Lady Potters 49, Metamora 25 – the only moment anyone cared about was that instant when Tenley Dowell fell to the court. Dowell is a rare talent, capable of scoring from anywhere in any way and eager to defend the other team’s best. She went down early in the fourth quarter. She had made a pass out of a trap and taken a long step to follow the ball. Suddenly, she cried out in pain.

Becker’s first thought was a knee. He had seen ACL’s come apart. His daughter, Josi, lost a season two years ago. The all-stater Chandler Ryan played only nine games last season. But Dowell immediately reached back to her right ankle, and even as she dropped her head to the floor sobbing, even as Becker and trainer Katie Gavin knelt at Dowell’s side, there was some relief in knowing she reached for an ankle, not a knee.

Last season I asked Dowell a “on a scale of 1 to 10” question. In the sectional championship, she made two free throws to assure victory. She’d shot 50 percent at the line all season, so how nervous was she with that game on the line? “Like, 7,” she said. Tonight I asked, “How much did the ankle hurt?” She said, “Like, 8.” Translated into old sportswriter language, that means it hurt like hell. The good news is, a rolled ankle will fix itself in time, a couple weeks maybe, but no scalpels are needed.

There’s not much to say about the game. In horse racing, they’d call it a walk-over. In boxing, it’s the champ knocking over a tomato can. In baseball, a laughter. For the undefeated, two-time defending state champion Lady Potters, it was their sixth straight victory this season, their 19th in a row overall, their 26th straight at the Potterdome, and their 72d in the last 78 games.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the mismatch was what seemed to be Metamora’s absolute determination to commit as many offensive fouls as possible. I made notes of seven offensive fouls, five charges, one illegal screen, one a push-down from behind. Some of those fouls could be attributed to good defensive positioning by the Lady Potters. But most came as Metamora’s stumblers stumbled toward the hoop. That, and acts of frustration by girls who knew they had fallen into the deep end of the shark tank.

Look, it was 30-11 at halftime.

About the third quarter, I will not type a word other than to say Morton led at quarter’s end, 32-13. You do the math.

Dowell’s two free throws early in the fourth quarter had raised the lead to 34-13 before she made that long step and rolled onto the outside of her foot. After that, nothing mattered except the extent of Dowell’s injury. She returned to the bench with 5:14 to play, an ice pack on the ankle. Her father, Troy, in his day a Pekin High basketball star, came from the training room with her, carrying her shoe and a bottle of Gatorade.

“Sprained,” he said later. “She’ll be OK.”

Brandi Bisping led Morton’s scoring with 17. Dowell and Jacey Wharram had 8 apiece, Kassidy Shurman 6, Caylie Jones 5, Josie Becker 3, and Lindsey Dullard 2.

Last I saw of the Dowells, a half hour after the game, they were headed back to the training room for treatment. Again, Tenley didn’t have to hobble. This time her father picked her up and carried her.

It wasn’t the shoes. Now we know that. On Friday, three days after LeBron James sent new shoes to each of the Lady Potters, they overwhelmed two opponents in their Thanksgiving Tournament: poor, stumbling Normal Community, 62-37. and poor, exhausted Danville Schlarman, 66-31. In the doing, the Potters needed no magical shoes. They wore their old ones, perhaps planning to bronze LeBron’s. Anyway, who needs LeBron when you’ve got Brandi, Jacey, Josi, Kassidy, and Tenley?

As part of a national Nike promotion hash-tagged #ComeOutOfNowhere, a crateful of James’s shoes arrived at Morton High School on Monday. With the shoes came a video that the coaches showed the Potters.

The video begins, “Hey, LeBron here,” LeBron says, as if there’s a basketball player anywhere who doesn’t recognize LeBron. “Congratulations to each and every one of you guys on last year’s journey, but obviously this year is a new journey . . . ”

James said he’d be following “from afar.” Then, with a smile, he suggested at times he’d “be watching very close. . . . It’s going to be an unbelievable season and best luck to each and every one of you.”

After the video, the Morton coaches plotted a surprise Tuesday afternoon. At each player’s locker, there was a T-shirt bearing the legend, “Come Out of Nowhere.” Hidden under each shirt, a box. To say the girls were thrilled on discovering the box contained a new pair of LeBron James shoes is to say LeBron can play a little. Suddenly, two days before Thanksgiving, it was Christmas.

Along with the shoes came a note signed by LeBron:

“Potters,

“You came out of nowhere last season. You lost 20+ points a game to an ACL injury. It would have been easy to take a seat. You already had a state title. Instead, the next girl stepped up. Now you have 2. What’s it going to take to win 3?

“I’ll be watching.”

Friday, LeBron would have seen the two-time defending state champion Potters playing so sensationally that their coach, Bob Becker, first said, “They played great,” and then, more loudly, “They played
GREAT.”

In both games, the Potters caused invocation of the tournament’s “mercy” rule in which the clock runs continuously once a team builds a 30-point lead. Their 15 three-pointers were divvied up among six players. On defense in someone’s face at every turn, they broke Normal Community’s spirit as prelude to leaving Danville Schlarman in despair.

The Potters are now 3-0, winners of 16 straight games reaching back to last season, winners of 25 straight in the Potterdome, winners 69 times in their last 75 games. Saturday morning, they play Champaign St. Thomas More. Saturday evening, in what shapes up as the five-team round-robin’s championship game, they play Peoria Richwoods.

Comes a moment of truth in all games. LeBron decided the NBA championship last June when he made that chase-down block on a Golden State break. No mere mortal could have done what he did, and no team led by that man was going to lose that night. The stage is smaller in girls high school basketball. But such moments are just as important, as when Tenley Dowell lit it up against Normal Community Friday morning.

First, the sophomore dropped in a 6-foot runner to give Morton a 31-18 lead with 1:29 left in the first half. At 1:07, from the right side, she made a 3-pointer. With 37 seconds left, another 3-pointer, this one from the top of the key. That gave her 20 points in the half, scored from everywhere in every way with either hand. She had given Morton a 37-18 lead. She robbed Normal Community of hope. In the middle of that run, Normal Community’s despair was made audible, if not palpable, to all. One of the Lady Iron, not all iron, tripped in the lane and landed on her hind-end with a ker-lumph that we heard and she no doubt felt.

Dowell finished with 25 points in that victory, Brandi Bisping added 10, Josi Becker and Lindsey Dullard 7 apiece, Caylie Jones 6, Jacey Wharram 3, and Claire Kraft and Megan Gold 2 each.

Danville Schlarman dressed only eight players. It required no practiced eye to see that only one much mattered. That one was a 5-foot-10 guard, Anaya Peoples, a sophomore already considered a Division-1 prospect (with an alleged 13 scholarship offers as a freshman). She did next to nothing against the Potters. Seven points. The Potters played her straight up with Kassidy Shurman, Dowell, and Bisping taking turns on defense – and that’s where this one ended for Schlarman.

It happened early. The Potters held an 11-2 lead. At point guard, handling the ball every time down, Peoples was intent on making something happen. Trouble for her was, Morton’s defense was intent on letting nothing happen. When Peoples could find no teammate moving, she just kept dribbling, looking for an opening. She found none. I counted the dribbles. She bounced the thing 24 times – that’s 24, two dozen times, eight times enough to get your hind-end ker-lumphed onto Becker’s bench – wasting an entire minute – and then, finding herself near the low block on the right side, stumbling, almost falling –you couldn’t call it a shot, Peoples just flipped the ball lamely backwards at the basket, hitting nothing but air.

Ten seconds later, taking that ball out of the air, the Potters had made two passes that led to a Josi Becker 3-pointer and a 14-2 lead at the quarter. From there they ran Schlarman silly at both ends.

Bisping led Morton’s scorers with 15, Dowell had 13, Josi Becker 9, Claire Kraft 6, Courtney Jones and Maddy Becker 5 each, Jacey Wharram and Megan Gold 4 each, Lindsey Dullard 3, and Bridget Wood 2.

**

LeBron’s note about the Potters winning last season despite losing a “20+ scorer” is cause for an update on that scorer, Chandler Ryan. Now at Florida Gulf Coast University, Ryan recently reinjured her right knee and has not played this season. She is scheduled to have exploratory surgery Dec. 9 to see if further surgery is needed to repair the ACL. In any case, she will miss this season without losing any eligibility.

Not to worry, dear reader, we will get to the basketball in this basketball story. We will account for the Lady Potters’ latest championship. They won their own Thanksgiving invitational Saturday with two victories, 47-17 over Champaign Thomas More and 50-35 over Peoria Richwoods. The scores deceive. The first game wasn’t that close. The second was too close.
Explanation is coming.

But first . . .

About 9:45 Saturday morning, the smoke alarm went off in the Morton High School gymnasium. The sound was accompanied by flashing lights around the Potterdome. Someone called the fire department, and a couple minutes later someone called the fire department to say, “Never mind.” By then, I recognized the problem. More often than a guy should admit, I, too, have set off the smoke alarm while making popcorn.

The Potterdome concession folks had started their morning preparations for the Potters’ Thanksgiving Tournament crowd. I believe it is a law that no basketball game can be played inside the village limits unless popcorn is popped. So someone tossed popcorn into the popping machine and turned on the necessary electric juice. Then everyone walked away – only to return, coughing, as smoke curled to the ceiling.

Turns out you burn the popcorn if you forget to put popcorn oil in with the popcorn.

Been there, done that.
Many years ago, I learned better than to do a meandering, direction-less start to a story. I was told that readers have lots to do. An editor said, “I could knit a sweater from dryer lint before you get to the point.”

So I usually start quickly. Not today. Nope. We all could have died in a popcorn fire. Think about that. But we survived. What’s the rush, then, to get to the point? Let’s celebrate. Let’s deal here with interesting stuff that usually gets put at the end of basketball stories, such as – yes! – women referees.

Two women worked Morton’s games, one in the morning, one in the championship game. I’ve always thought it odd that so few women are basketball referees, particularly in women’s games. I asked both the women why that was.

“Meanness,” the morning woman said. She believes spectators say things to women referees that they don’t say to the men.
The second referee laughed. She said, “They don’t like getting yelled at.”

I love Things You Learn While Learning Something Else. Talking to the referees, I learned about uniform rules in girls’ basketball. I’d seen a referee go to the Potters’ Brandi Bisping during pre-game warm-ups and order a change of head-bands. Bisping switched from red to black – because head-bands must match the color of a player’s knee pads. Also: Spandex shorts must match head-bands Also: undershirts must match head-bands and knee pads.

Huh? Really?

“Really,” the second woman referee said. “We’re the uniform police.”

Here’s another interesting thing that getting-to-the-point-in-a-rush might cause us to miss: an out-of-town coach’s assessment of the Potters. Because the tournament brought in teams along I-74 from Danville to Champaign to Normal to Morton to Peoria, the games attracted maybe a dozen college and high school coaches. One said, “Morton’s coaching is as good as it gets. And those girls play hard and unselfishly. I just love the unselfishness. They play the game the way it’s supposed to be played.”

OK, now we’re talking basketball. To leave Thomas More in arrears not to mention out of breath, the Potters went on a 20-0 run in eight minutes of the first half for a 33-7 lead. The sophomore Tenley Dowell, a star on the rise, scored 12 of those game-deciding points – on a floater in the paint, two fast-break layups, a put-back, a jumper from the top of the key, and two free throws.
Afterwards, I asked the Thomas More coach, Tom Garriott, whose Prairie Central teams lost to Morton in the Potters’ two state-championship seasons, how this year’s group compared to those.

“Same,” he said. “Disciplined, deep, and they all can shoot.”

Dowell led Morton with 16 points. Bisping had 13, Lindsey

Dullard 9, Josie Becker 5, and Jacy Wharram and Courtney Jones had 2 each.

Peoria Richwoods did a nervous-making thing against the Potters. Though it never led, Richwoods used a mobile and hostile 2-3 trapping zone to force the Potters into ball-handling errors and hurried shots. The Potters built an apparently comfortable lead at 29-16 midway through the third quarter. They did it suddenly, with three 3-pointers in 1 1/2 minutes – one by Becker, two by Dowell.

But Richwoods made the Potters uncomfortable by scratching within seven early in the fourth quarter, 31-24. Again, the Potters moved away, this time on a 3-pointer by Kassidy Shurman and another 3 by Dowell. And yet Morton led only 40-33 with 3 1.2 minutes to play. By then, Richwoods was forced to foul and hope Morton missed free throws.

But the Potters closed it out with a 10-2 run, the last six points coming at the line.

Dowell had 19 points, Bisping 12. Caylie Jones 6, Dullard had 5, Shurman and Becker 3 each, and Jacey Wharram 2.

Morton is now 5-0, winner of 18 straight games going back to last season, winner of 27 straight in the Potterdome, and winner in 71 of its last 77 games.

Three basketball factoids out of the four-game tournament: the Potters’ defense gave up as many as 12 points in a quarter only once, to Richwoods. . . . meanwhile, the Potters made 34 3’s (by 6 players) . . . which means Morton scored 102 points on 3’s while opponents scored only 120 on everything.

Now, before watching “Saturday Night Live,” I’m going to make some popcorn. Wish me luck.