Lady Potters 52 Canton 43
The Potters now have won the five games they were supposed to win. They had a chance in their three losses, beaten late in the going by teams that can win state championships. So there is that. They are good and getting better.
Still, please, enough with the nervous-making. First, the drive from Morton to Canton. You risk well-being if not life itsownself by the hour’s drive on Route 9, all bumpity-bumpity, twisting and turning. In the dark of night, you pass hollow-eyed ghost towers, a gi-normous plant creating God knows what evil chemicals, and moonlit duck hunters’ swamplands a foot off your door handle. When you reach Canton’s lights of pizza-place civilization, you turn north at a cemetery. Finally, praise be, you arrive at lovely old Alice Ingersoll gymnasium.
Then comes the entertainment, a new kind of adventure, a basketball game that is an hour of worry, doubt, and distress.
Home now, midnight coming, I need a beer.
Twice when victory seemed certain and only unimagined mistakes could have denied them the W, the Potters failed at the simplest task. Twice in a minute, they couldn’t get the ball in-bounds inside five seconds. They were up by eight with 3:43 to play. About then, the basketball god Panic must have whispered scary stuff to the Potters.
Twice, five-second violations. Twice they gave the ball to Canton under its own basket. That’s twice, as two times one, twice in a minute.
I, for one, had never seen that before.
But here’s the wonder. When it mattered most, the Potters were at their best.
I loved it when a 5-foot-10 freshman, Paige Selke, made a move along the baseline and went up big-time strong for a layup off the square. That made it 45-35 at 2:40.
Canton, now 6-4 for the season, came back with a 3-pointer, its eighth, its offense pushed outside by the Potters’ aggressive defenders. From there, the game’s deciding last minutes belonged to the Potters. More specifically, crunch time belonged to the veteran star, Ellie VanMeenen.
Between her team’s defensive stops, handling the ball against Canton’s desperate full-court press, VanMeenen went to the free throw line six times in the last minute and two seconds. Until then, the Potters had made 3 of 9 free throws. Miserable.
At 1:02, VanMeenen made two.
At :27.5, two more.
At :08.5, her fifth and sixth in a row.
In the last two minutes, then, with victory there to be taken, VanMeenen took it. In those minutes, Morton outscored Canton 7-3. We all know coach Bob Becker’s formula for victory. Win the game’s first three minutes, the second half’s first three minutes, and the game’s last three minutes. Tonight, Morton won those time periods, 8-0, 7-4, and 9-3. That comes to 24-7.
Once Morton had that 8-0 lead (built on 3’s by Izzy Hutchinson and Addy Engel), Canton came no closer than four. Becker was not always pleased with his team’s defense. (Its trapping defense sometimes lost track of Canton people in the paint.) Nor was he always pleased with his team’s offense. (Again too many turnovers, 14, including those unforgivables suggested by Panic’s whispers.)
Still, he saw enough good stuff in this Mid-Illini Conference opener to say, “We’re going to be a contender.”
Oh, and of VanMeenen’s free throws in the last minute, Becker said she had made 45 straight in a practice session this week. He also reached back to a Potter all-time great for comparison.
“With the game on the line, Ellie knocked ‘em down," he said. "She looked like Chandler Ryan out there,” Chandler Ryan legendary for a 2015 state-championship run when, in the six state tournament games, she went 51 for 52 at the line and declared herself unafraid of the big moment. “I knew,” she said, “I wouldn’t miss.”
VanMeenen had a touch of that moxie in her tonight.
When I suggested she wanted the ball at the end, she said, “Yeah.”
I asked when she had felt like that before.
“Probably never,” she said, smiling.
She led Morton’s scoring with 21. Hutchinson had 12 (with 5 steals) Engel 8, Selke 7, and Abby VanMeenen 4 (a freshman making her first start, also had 7 rebounds).
