To win it once is a dream. Twice, a fantasy. Three times in a row, who could believe that? Easier to believe in pumpkins rising, floating, and dancing in the sky over Morton. But here we are. At Redbird Arena today, hundreds of raucous Morton High School students sent up the happiest chant a basketball team could hear in March, “GOING TO THE ‘SHIP…GOING TO THE ‘SHIP.” Yes, tomorrow the championship game. Again, the Lady Potters can do what once seemed unbelievable but now is the next thing to an expectation.

Before the Potters, no small-town public school had ever won the Class 3A state championship. Which means no one ever did it twice or even got crazy enough to think they might do it three times. In 40 years of Illinois girls basketball, only perennial powerhouse Lombard Montini, a private school out of the Chicago suburbs, ever won the 3A three straight times, 2010-11-12.

But here we are, pumpkins dancing in the sky and the Lady Potters with a third straight state championship one game away.

“Unbelievable,” the Morton coach, Bob Becker, said, which is a thing a coach says when he doesn’t want to say out loud that he believed – from the soles of his court-stomping feet to the top of his new haircut – that his team would show those big-city kids that basketball is best played around the pumpkin patches of central Illinois.

Believe the numbers. Morton 56, Chicago Simeon 41.

Yes, believe the numbers. In the last three seasons of state tournament play, the Potters have won 20 straight games in regionals, sectionals, super-sectionals, and final fours at Redbird Arena.

Really believe the numbers. In their last five games at Redbird, the Potters have won by 14 points, by 10, by 15, by 17, and today by 15.

Believe, too, what you saw today. You saw the little point guard, Josi Becker, throw in four 3-pointers to keep the Potters alive in the first half. You saw Tenley Dowell scoring inside and out from beginning to end. You saw all-stater Brandi Bisping, with one point at halftime, score 19 of the Potters’ 34 when it mattered most. You saw the Potters, for the umpteenth time, run an opponent into physical and psychic exhaustion. It was 22-all at halftime; early in the third quarter, it was 46-30.

Believe what you learned in one possession. On that trip, the Potters left Simeon’s defenders wondering what in the hell just happened. Here came Josi Becker with the ball. I say that without remembering it precisely. But every possession seems to start with the ball in Becker’s hands. So, let’s say Becker passes it down the right side to Kassidy Shurman. On the dribble, Shurman slashes across the key and around to the left side. She bounces a pass to Dowell on a back-cut, who gets to the left low block. She might go up for a shot, but she doesn’t feel it. Instead, a clever bounce pass across the lane to Jacey Wharram. She might score. No. She flips the ball into the lane where Bisping goes up for a four-footer. It’s now 48-32 with 5:04 to play. I scribble a note about Simeon’s deflate defenders: “They’ve quit.”

On that play, two quotes . . .

Bisping, by way of defining her team’s unselfishness: “Everybody wants to give it to everybody.”

Bob Becker: “That’s how basketball should be played.”

Believe the empirical evidence of two runs. In the first run, the Potters scored the first 13 points in 5:31 of the third quarter to go up 35-22. (Becker made no tactical adjustments, “our kids just kept their poise and composure.”) In the second run, Morton outscored Simeon 11-2 in less than two minutes at the end of the third quarter and into the fourth. That’s a 24-2 margin in the heart of a game.

Dowell started the first run with two 3’s. Bisping powered in a layup. (She’d become aggressive in moving against Simeon’s gang-tackling defense, no longer giving it time to surround her and claw at the ball.) Then the freshman Lindsey Dullard pulled off a veteran’s play. As one of Simeon’s stars grabbed a defensive rebound and held it overhead, Dullard reached up and strong-armed it out of her hands.

“Just that simple?” I asked Dullard. “You saw it, you took it?”

“Yeah,” she explained.

The theft led to a pair of Dowell free throws, and, 20 seconds later, Dullard made a 3-pointer of her own to cap the 13-0 run.

Believe, too, in Bob Becker’s two-thumbs-up signal. You saw it at the end of the second run. He stood at his bench, smiling and applauding Bisping, whose drive past dead-on-their-feet defenders resulted in a layup. The coach and his star – he calls her “a champion” – have a two-thumbs-up history that started two years ago, she said, “in a sarcastic way.” She remembers the coach telling her not to guard a player, and that player promptly made three long shots. So she gave the coach the two-thumbs-up sign, like, “Yeah, good coaching, Coach.” The evolution of the sign’s meaning, from sarcasm to high praise, is now complete.

Bisping led Morton’s scoring with 20, Dowell had 15, Josi Becker 12. Caylie Jones had 4, Dullard 3, Wharram 2.

(Speaking of Jacey Wharram, her sister, Jadison, a star on last season’s state champions, came rushing into a front-row seat early in the first quarter. Now a nursing student at Illinois State, Jadison had two tests today. “I did the first one in 12 minutes and ran over here,” she said. At halftime she had to leave for the second test: “Anatomy.” She finished it in Schroeder Hall, then watched the rest of the game by live-stream. She’ll be in the front row again tomorrow. No tests.)

The Potters’ championship opponent tomorrow will be an old acquaintance, Rochester, a 46-35 winner over previously undefeated Chicago Marshall. In March of 2015, Morton won its first state championship by beating Rochester, 47-37. Rochester’s go-to scorer is back from that season, the 6-foot-3 Angela Perry, who does most of her work inside but had made 26 of 53 3-pointers going into today’s game. I’d say the Potters are no more concerned about her than they were about Simeon’s two big-girl scorers who managed only 12 points today instead of their customary 24.

Morton is 34-2 for the season, Rochester is 32-3. The teams have played six common opponents: Peoria High, Springfield, Chatham Glenwood, U High, Normal Community, and Rock Island. Both are 8-1 with those teams (both losing to Rock Island, neither close).

I believe the Potters will win tomorrow, 48-40.

This morning the Lady Potters ate breakfast.

Then they ate some more.

“I got two plates, one in each hand, and they both were full,” said Olivia Remmert, a freshman new to the Potters’ let’s-win-State-again thing.

At 7:45 a.m. the team gathered at the farm home of Todd and Linda Bisping, parents of the Potters’ all-time leading scorer (Brooke, class of ‘09) and all-time leading rebounder (Brandi, today named an Associated Press first-team all-stater).

“Mrs. Bisping is such a good cook,” Remmert said, and what she said next caused me to gain five pounds even before she finished her cataloguing of good-cookery: “Biscuits with gravy, sausage, eggs, fruit, chocolate-chip pancakes, chocolate-chip scones . . .”

Properly stuffed, the Potters then did . . ..

A short practice in the Potterdome . . . a “Parade of Champions” behind the school’s roof-rattling drum corps past hundreds of cheering students in the hallways . . . (A note here: the school’s 500 tickets are sold out, but tickets will be available at the arena. The school will provide four 60-seat buses for students) . . . and then the team embarked for Illinois State University’s Redbird Arena where they worked out briefly and attended to media obligations – such as answering a videographer’s question, “What’s the most embarrassing thing that happened to you this season?”

Jacey Wharram’s answer, with a blush: “I wore my shorts backwards one game and didn’t know it until halftime.”

At 11 o’clock tomorrow, the Potters, 32-2 for the season, play Chicago Simeon, 23-6, in a semifinal of the Class 3A tournament. Win that one, and win again Saturday afternoon, the Potters will have won the 3A championship three straight times. Only one other school in 40 years of Illinois girls basketball has done that. (Lombard Montini, 2010-11-12. More history: Morton is the only small-town public school ever to win the 3A title once, let alone twice.)

If we know Simeon at all, it’s because the Chicagoans were gawdawful in losing to Morton in the Potters’ 2014 Thanksgiving tournament, 72-40. They are better now, of course, though what I’ve seen on video and what I saw in their workout today gives me reason to believe the Potters should be favored tomorrow. A victory will send Morton the championship game against the Chicago Marshall-Rochester winner. That’s likely to be Marshall. It’s Chicago’s best 3A team, an eight-time state champion undefeated in 32 games this season. Morton’s coach, Bob Becker, has said, “They’re the real deal.”

At Redbird today, the Potters worked out just enough to stay loose. Everyone was having fun, even working around the third annual Redbird “Horse” 3-point shooting duel that pitted Becker against assistant coach Brooke Bisping. Each had won once. Becker won this time, the dagger delivered from 35 feet.

As to the Potters’ mood with a three-peat there for the taking, I asked some players for one word . . .

Jacey Wharram: “Pumped.”

Olivia Remmert: “Determined.”

Josi Becker: “Excited.”

Tenley Dowell: “Awesome.”

Kassidy Shurman: “Ecstatic.”

Caylie Jones: “Exhilarated.”
Brandi Bisping: “Ready.”

It’s going to happen. They’re going to make a run. I could look up how many times they’ve done it. Just know they’re 32 and 2 because they’ve done it a bunch. Tonight, one more time, somebody thought they had a chance against the Morton High School Lady Potters. The somebodies this time were a point up early. But in four or five blinks of the eye, the somebodies were 16 down. To look at the Potters you’d think, nice teenage girls, all smiles, girls having fun. But to play ‘em you’d think, sure, they’re nice. They’re nice, like, they’d steal your lunch money and, sure, maybe they’d give it to orphans, but, anyway, why don’t they just go play UConn?

So Stillman Valley didn’t really have a chance.

Morton 48, the somebodies 31.

Their straight super-sectional victory and fourth in five seasons moves the Potters to the final four at Redbird Arena this weekend. They play a Friday morning semifinal against Chicago Simeon, a 44-23 winner over Morgan Park. They need two more victories for their third straight state Class 3A championship – a three-peat done only once in 40 years of Illinois girls basketball history, that by Lombard Montini in 2010-11-12.

“One step closer,” Brandi Bisping, the Potters’ senior all-stater, said.

For the sake of an analogy to come, I will introduce Stillman Valley’s namesake, the U.S. Army general, Isaiah Stillman. During the Black Hawk war that moved across northern Illinois in the early 19th century, Gen. Stillman led 275 soldiers into a battle with Sauk and Fox warriors. For reasons unknown, the general decided his troops were outnumbered by thousands of Indians when, in fact, there were 50. The general fled the battlefield and history books now speak of “Stillman’s Run.”

Yes, like the poor general, the Stillman High girls thought everything was going well – until it wasn’t.

They led, 17-16, with 3:57 to play in the second quarter. Their star, a 6-foot-3 center, had scored 10 points and dominated the boards. They might have thought, Morton? Big deal. Back-to-back state champions? We’ve got ‘em down. We can play with ‘em. Just keep doing what we’re doing.

Doing what you’re doing is easy against some folks. But not so easy against a team talented enough, smart enough, and relentless enough to disrupt you at both ends of the floor every minute of the game. Once ahead by that single point, Stillman Valley did not score for approximately all night.

In big games, 7 minutes and 57 seconds can feel like all night – and that’s how long Stillman Valley got nothing done.

Meanwhile, the Potters had gone on a 17-0 run. Once down 17-16, suddenly they were up, 33-17. They knew what they’d done. Listen to them sing:

“Crazy awesome,” Bisping said.

“Our defense shut them down,” Josi Becker said.

“Even when we were behind, I was thinking, ‘We got this,’” Jacey Wharram said. “When we got ahead, it was, ‘We’re not going to be behind anymore.’”

“A sigh of relief,” Tenley Dowell said.

The game-turning run deserves close attention because it speaks of so much the Potters do well. Long-time assistant coach Bill Davis put it one fat paragraph, like this:

“We bring pressure defensively that sets up our offense,” he said. “Out of our 2-3 zone, our 1-3-1, our press, we force them into dangerous passes. We know where those passes are going and we take them. We get stops and when you’re turning defensive stops into all those extra layups, you’re on a run.”

Tonight’s game-turning run began with a Bisping put-back of her own missed shot. That made it 18-17 at 3:03 of the second quarter.

Caylie Jones, a junior coming off the bench, “a star in her role,” to quote head coach Bob Becker, followed with a 12-foot jumper. Bisping moved an offensive rebound to Dowell, who scored from 14 feet. A Lindsey Dullard takeaway of a Stillman Valley dribble led to a Jones layup. Then Jones, cutting from the top of the key, intercepted a Stillman Valley pass for a possession that led, seconds later, to an in-bounds play that worked perfectly – a Josi Becker bounce pass to Jones for another layup.

It was 26-17 at the half, and by then it was clear that Morton had not only taken the lead, it also had beaten Stillman Valley the way it has beaten so many teams this season – by relentless pressure that wears them down physically and mentally. Perhaps only Peoria High and Rock Island, ranked No. 1 in Class 4A, matched Morton’s speed and endurance this season. Only Rock Island, a 20-point winner, can say it handled everything Morton brought.

The Potters’ run continued the first two minutes of the third quarter, beginning with Jones making a jumper from the free throw line. Then came my favorite play of the night. From the top of the key, Jones side-armed a long bounce pass, maybe 20 feet, to the back-cutting Dowell, who took it on the run for a layup.

Starting to explain the pass, Jones first said, “I had to make up for the last game because of the double-dribble.” In the sectional championship game, Jones dribbled out front. Stopped, picked up the dribble. Then turned the other way, resuming the dribble en route to a layup. The referees saw nothing, one even stopping to ask a fan, “Did I miss a double-dribble?”

Jones saw Dowell making the back-cut to the rim.

“I knew I had to put a lot of spin under it,” she said of the pass.

Dowell said, “There was just a really small gap there, and the pass had to be really low, but Caylie’s pass was perfect.”

A minute later, Dowell scored again, this time a 3-pointer.

It was all done in 5 minutes and 22 seconds.

Morton won that third quarter, 9-2, and made 11 free throws in the fourth quarter to notify Stillman Valley that it had its chance and its chance was over.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 17. Becker had 10, Jones and Bisping 8 each, Dullard 3, and Wharram 2.

One thing more. All this came the day after a locker room mystery. When the Potters showed up for a workout Sunday, they saw notes on a chalkboard.

“33-3 was good.”

(Good enough to win it all two seasons ago.)

“33-3 again was good.”

(A second championship.)

“34 and 2 is the new goal.”

(By winning out.)

“Ain’t nothin’ to it, just do it.”

I can’t reveal the writer’s identity, but his initials are Bill Davis.

There came a time when Brandi Bisping found a path around and through traffic for a layup. So sensational was her work that it caused hundreds of Morton High School students, raucous all night, rocking alongside parents, grandparents, and other more sedate if no less thrilled Lady Potters fans – it caused those students to send up a Bisping-appreciation chant, “YOU CAN’T STOP HER . . . YOU CAN’T STOP HER.”

She was not the only unstoppable. The Potters have five people the coach identifies as offensive “weapons.” Any of them can put up 20 points a night. They have what they call “lock-down” defense whether they’re in man-to-man or zone or scaring the bejabbers out of you with a full-court trapping press. Because they can go eight deep with fresh legs, they are relentless, they are in perpetual motion, they never allow you to breathe freely. Besides that, their toughest nut has a quote for you. “There’s not a tougher team in Illinois,” Bisping said.

All that is true, proven by results, and it is a wonder because, truth to tell, I never thought the Potters could win a state championship. That’s a Chicago thing. No small-town public school in 37 seasons of Illinois girls basketball had ever done it – until the girls from Morton’s pumpkin patches did it two seasons ago – and then did it AGAIN last season – and now talk boldly about finishing off a THREE-PEAT the first weekend in March.

How boldly do they talk?

Listen up.

“For all those reasons,” Bisping said, an allusion to my catalogue of stuff that good basketball teams do, “that’s why we’re going all the way.”

“Win it all again?” I said.

“We didn’t come all this way to lose,” she said.

Tonight the Potters won their third straight sectional championship by dominating Normal’s U High, 58-42. Now 31-2 for the season, they are three victories away from the three-peat – a feat done only once in Illinois girls history. The Potters play Monday in the Manlius super-sectional against Stillman Valley. The winner moves to the final four at Illinois State University’s Redbird Arena.

Here’s how good Morton was tonight: U High came in with a 28-4 record and it never led once. It never had a chance, not even when it trailed only 18-15 late in the first half. For it was there, in the half’s last minute and 10 seconds, that Morton not only achieved separation on the scoreboard but achieved separation in thought. I will explain.

It was 18-15 when Josi Becker did her thing. The coach, Bob Becker, says he can’t brag on Josi Becker because he’s her father. So I’m here to tell you what Josi did. She did amazing. How she got there, I have no clue. But somehow she came dribbling from deep in the right corner. She’s a point guard, 5-foot-3. As she moved from right to left, she disappeared into a forest of the big people clogging the lane.

Then, this was the amazing, she reappeared on the left side of the lane. From there she scored on a smooth left-handed layup.

Now it’s 20-15 with 1:10 left in the half.

The lock-down defense stopped U High, and Bisping wrapped her bear-claw hands on an offensive rebound. Falling down, she moved a pass to Becker at the top of the key. From there, a 3-pointer.

Now it’s 23-15 with 29 seconds left.

At the other end, Bisping took a rebound with seven seconds remaining. It seemed she would have time to try a mid-court shot. She did have time. But no mid-court shot.

On the run with the ball, she did not slow down. She sprinted past three U High defenders directly to the basket and scored on a layup at the buzzer.

Now it’s 25-15.

The separation on the scoreboard was one thing. Ten points is a lot better than three. The more important separation was in Morton’s sudden brilliance. It was the kind of foot-on-their-neck dominance that affirms one team’s confidence and lets the other know the party’s over, turn out the lights. After that 7-0 burst in 70 seconds, Morton never allowed U High to come closer than eight points. By the third quarter’s end, Morton had built its lead to 20 points, 43-23.

We were speaking of toughness. Here’s tough. Brandi Bisping again. Midway in that game-turning third quarter, Bisping did her thing. She drove to the basket as if the hounds of hell were at her heels. A U High girl thought to stop the all-stater. That called for a hip-check blocking foul that sent Bisping ker-rashing to the floor. Only when she stepped to the free throw line did anyone notice the blood.

Because she ripped some skin from her left wrist, the game was stopped momentarily to allow a trainer to wrap tape around the wound. As Bisping went to the line, a U High player told a referee, “She’s got blood on her shorts.” By rule, Bisping had to leave the game until the blood was rubbed away.

“When they said that about the blood, I was thinking, ‘You must really want me out of here,’” Bisping said later.

Well, yeah, they would want that. Morton led, 30-19, and Bisping had scored 13 herself. The curious episode of Bisping’s injury came early in a 15-4 run that settled the issue. Lindsey Dullard had started it with a driving layup off an in-bounds play. Kassidy Shurman made a free throw in Bisping’s place. Then Caylie Jones dropped in a layup. Tenley Dowell followed with a 3 and a fast-break layup. That’s when Bisping found her way to a layup and a 40-23 lead that set off the YOU CAN’T STOP HER chant, followed by another directed to U High students across the way, “WHY SO QUIET? WHY SO QUIET?”

For all that, my favorite play came next. To say it was another 3 by Dowell is to leave out the wonder of it. It began, as nearly all of Morton’s offense begins, with the ball in Becker’s hands. The Potters wanted the quarter’s last shot. From a spot near the arc on the right side, Becker moved the ball to Bisping inside. From there to Dullard at the top of the key. Over to Dowell behind the arc on the left side. All of those passes done more quickly than I can type the words. And Dowell’s 3-pointer falls in with the clock showing :01.6.”

Just beautiful.

Bisping led Morton’s scoring with 17. She also had 9 rebounds. Becker had 16 points, Dowell 12. Shurman, Dullard, and Caylie Jones had 4 apiece. Maddy Becker had 1.

“We’re playing our best basketball right now,” Bob Becker said, and no one could argue that, certainly not the losing coach, Laura Sellers, whose team has now lost six straight to Morton, three this year and three last year. It was, I guess, an insensitive question to ask a coach whose team finished 28-5 – “A great U High team,” Becker said – but lost three times to Morton.

I asked Sellers, “Can Morton win it all again?”

The poor coach said, almost in a whisper, “Sure.”

The next morning, the score was up there. Every day for a while, those numbers were on the scoreboard. Practice didn’t start until those numbers were lit up. No one remembers exactly how long the numbers were up there except they were up there a longggggg time. Every day, every practice, maybe for two weeks, the scoreboard’s bright red lights showed a “40” and a “37.” Or, as junior forward Caylie Jones called it, “That score.”

Thirty-five days ago, the Morton High School Lady Potters lost to Galesburg in Galesburg’s gym by that score. Even that night, the Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, reckoned his team would see the Silver Streaks again – probably in the sectional tournament, probably late in February when games come with more meaning. So, 35 days ago, Becker started lighting up the Potterdome scoreboard with a reminder of what had happened.

By tonight, those red lights had burned themselves so deeply into the Potters’ brains that Jones said her team played with “a sense of revenge.” Or, as senior all-stater Brandi Bisping said in anticipation of joy to come, “Them again.”

This time the Potters’ number was 54.

Them had 24.

This time when the Potters scored their 37th point, Them had 12.

As one measure of Morton’s superiority, the Potters had enough points at halftime, 26, to win without ever scoring again. There is also this: Galesburg came in as a regional champion with a 24-7 season’s record that included that 40-37 victory 35 days ago and yet never had a chance tonight, beaten every way a team can be beaten. The Potters’ lead was only 19-10 midway through the second quarter when I scribbled a note: “4:35 – M just the better team.”

Morton was the better team for many reasons. It has good athletes with size. Yes. It has eight, nine, maybe 10 players who could start for any other team they’ve played this season. Yes. But it is 30-2 for the season – and now two victories away from another trip to Redbird Arena — because all its people know how to play basketball. They know how to take care of the ball, they know how to shoot. Yes. They learned that in the third grade. More important, they know how to move on offense and defense, and they know to anticipate movement, their opponents’ and their own. Peoria High coach Meechie Edwards said the definitive words after his team fell apart under Morton’s relentless pressure at both ends: “They’re a smart team.” The Potters do almost nothing dumb and they do almost everything with a purpose – as illustrated in a wonderful little scene early in the third quarter.

Morton’s Tenley Dowell had two free throws to put the Potters up 28-16. Bisping was on the lane. Becker shouted her name. When she turned to see what he wanted, she saw the coach deep in a defensive crouch, arms spread wide.

“Telling me to ‘get low,’” Bisping said later.

She saw the coach getting low, so she turned fully away from her spot on the lane, faced Becker, and, smiling all the way, dropped into her own defensive crouch. Done with a purpose: Yes, Coach. I’ll get low.

“Might as well have fun,” she said.

On his coaching whiteboard, Becker had scrawled four pre-game messages for his team:

Make every play like your last
D it up
Dominate the glass
Toughness

Might as well have all that fun, and the Potters did. Last month, they lost to Galesburg by those 40-37 numbers. But that was January, and this is Win-or-Go-Home. Back then, Brandi Bisping was recovering from mono. “Struggling,” she said. She had 12 points, but only 4 in the last 15 minutes when Morton could not come back from 26-16 down at halftime. Tonight, no struggle – she scored Morton’s first two baskets, both 3-pointers, and had 10 points by quarter’s end, the Potters ahead for good at 13-7.

I loved it when Bisping made her second 3-pointer. She was also fouled on the shot. Or seemed to have been fouled. Anyway, she went falling backwards and a referee called a foul on Galesburg. Even as Bisping went to the line to finish a rare 4-point play, Galesburg coach Evan Massey was in a referee’s ear. Lip-readers at the far end of the gym saw him telling the referee that Bisping “flops.” Ear-witnesses near Massey heard him use the flop word and characterized the coach’s tone as “whiny.”

Galesburg still had a prayer when Morton’s lead was 17-10 midway in the second quarter – except it was becoming obvious that the Streaks could not score against a Morton defense that Becker called “awesome, just awesome.” So awesome, in fact, that when Galesburg was forced by defensive pressure into a traveling violation, Becker came leaping off the bench, pumping a fist in giddy celebration. “Defense is fun for these kids,” Becker said.

Meanwhile, the Potters scored every which way. Caylie Jones made a 12-footer and a layup. Josi Becker a 3. Jones another move inside. Dowell’s two free throws during the Becker-Bisping act. Bisping a 3 from the top of the arc followed by a 17-footer, two free throws, and a put-back of her own blocked shot.

Suddenly, on an 18-2 run in 9 minutes and 40 seconds, the Potters had come to that lovely score: Morton 37, Them 12.

My favorite piece of the Potters’ defensive work came at the start of the fourth quarter. After playing man-to-man to that point, Becker’s team surprised Galesburg with a full-court trapping defense that featured its longest players up-front: Bisping, Dowell, and Lindsey Dullard, the team’s so-called “Condor Line.” When the three girls jumped at a Galesburg ball-handler, it was, like, Whaaa, where’d they come from???? Soon enough, Galesburg’s offense became desperate cross-court passes leading nowhere.

“They didn’t know how to play without running their sets,” Dowell said.

I asked Massey about his team’s offensive troubles. For one thing, the Streaks were 0-for-13 on 3’s. (After making zero 3’s in that loss at Galesburg, the Potters made 5 3’s this time.)

“We never got comfortable,” Massey said, which is a losing coach’s way of acknowledging the success of Becker’s third whiteboard point: D it up.

Bisping led Morton’s scoring with 23. (She also had 13 rebounds and became the Potters’ all-time rebound leader with 1,060, 11 more than Cindy Bumgarner.) Jones had 10 points, Dowell 8, Dullard 5, Josi Becker 4, Kassidy Shurman 2, and Bridget Wood 2.

The Potters next play Thursday night for the sectional championship against the winner of Tuesday night’s U High-Richwoods game. They have beaten U High twice this season and Richwoods once.

Because they’d seen those 40 and 37 numbers more often than they wished to see them, some Potters had asked their coach when he’d turn them off.

“When we win,” he had said.

So, I asked tonight, when will he put up the 54 and 24?

“Was that the score?” Becker said, and he smiled, and he said, “Maybe I’ll go in there tonight.”

Sometimes, at some basketball games, you forget to breathe. Except it’s not really about breathing. It’s about exhaling. Without meaning to, you’re holding your breath. And until you remember to exhale, you can’t breathe again. So there you are, waiting to exhale because lest you miss whatever wonder comes next. Some games just leave you breathless – such as tonight’s, the Morton High School Lady Potters beating Peoria High, 66-46, for a regional championship.

Imagine this. You’re in the fourth row of the bleachers and the Potters’ point guard, Josi Becker, has the ball. She’s sprinting against a defender who wants the ball. Only Becker isn’t giving it up, not now, not ever. The little engine that could, Becker is a 5-foot-3 dynamo with a high-rev motor. If she sprinted a mile tonight, she sprinted five, all with the ball in her hands, flying through and around a full-game, fully-clawed, total-body-contact, end-to-end press that scared the bejeebers out of breathless people in the fourth row. But not Becker. I don’t care if she had a single assist and I don’t care that she scored 17 points. Nothing mattered except getting the ball up-court. “We knew it would be an up-tempo, physical game,” she says. Tired? “I’m probably going to sleep in tomorrow morning.”

Imagine this. Peoria’s senior star, Jailynn Lawson, has not scored. Her team is down, 43-27. She has not scored because she can find no way to beat the Morton defense, particularly the in-her-face defense played by Morton’s senior star, Brandi Bisping. So here’s Lawson on a drive. Here’s Bisping on the low block, right side. I’m holding my breath because I know what’s coming. Lawson will not slow down. Bisping will not move aside. And Lawson flips up a no-chance prayer while ker-rashing into Bisping, who ker-rashes to the court. And the call, properly, is a charge. I exhale. I see Bisping flat on her back. I see her pump both fists in a defender’s celebration of victory. “The 66-46 was not representative of how the game felt,” she says. Meaning no quarters were asked or given. A quick smile. Then: “Some of us just don’t like each other.”

Imagine the Potters’ sophomore, Tenley Dowell. Imagine her rising high for her first shot of the game, a 3-pointer from the right arc. By the first quarter’s end, she scores three more times, twice hurtling inside for layups delivered with a veteran’s crafty elegance. A third layup comes with 45 seconds left in the first quarter. She picks the pocket of a Peoria rebounder. The theft caps a 12-2 run giving the Potters a lead they never lost. “We were just flowing together,” Dowell says. “Everyone was executing so well.”

I could go on imagining. I will. Imagine the Morton coach, Bob Becker, ripping his suit coat off. His team leads, 28-18 at 2:23 of the second quarter. But he sees what’s happening. He sees Peoria’s press as a threat, not least because the men in zebra shirts see only one of every 10 hacking fouls committed by the desperate Peorians. So Becker rips off his coat, a coaching move usually good for a technical foul – only he gets one arm hung up and is so slow at throwing down the coat that the zebra men don’t notice. “The kids had grit, toughness, whatever you want to call it – and they kept their composure way better than I did,” Becker says.

Imagine what it all means. Unless I am mistaken, and I have been many times, I believe the Potters now have played their most difficult game leading to the final four at Redbird Arena. It’s not so much that Peoria High is an outstanding team, though it did win 20 games this year and, on January 21, lost to Morton by only a point, 54-53. The greater difficulty is that Peoria has two very good players – Jailynn Lawson, a Bradley University commit, and Mackenzie Jenkins, strong inside – and its frantic pace of play can force an opponent out of its comfort zone.

The Potters refused to be shaken. They led only 22-18 halfway through the second quarter. They then went on a 16-3 run of the kind that has carried the team to back-to-back state championships. With great ball-handling they moved through the Peoria press for six layups, the last scored by Dowell cutting back-door for a bounce pass from Bisping. The Potters also were 4-for-4 at the free throw line. At halftime, Morton 38-21.

It was 48-29 – Game Over — before Peoria’s Lawson scored her first points. Until then she was 0-for-7 against Bisping (and wound up 4-for-16, scoring 9 points, two fewer than she scored in an injury-shortened appearance when the teams met a month ago).

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 20 (17 in the first half). Becker’s 17 included 14 in the second half. Lindsey Dullard had 11, Bisping 10, Caylie Jones 4, Jacey Wharram 2, and Bridget Wood 2. (Bisping also had 7 rebounds, moving her career total to 1,047, two behind record holder Cindy Bumgarner.)

The Potters made seven 3-pointers, their season’s average, and now have 222 3’s for the season, a program record.

At 29-2 they are five victories away from another state championship. Monday night they play Galesburg in the Limestone sectional. It’s a rematch of the team’s game a month ago won by Galesburg 39-37. That night the Potters were shut out on 3’s, the only time that’s happened all season. I don’t expect it to happen again, nor, apparently, does tonight’s losing coach, Meechie Edwards, generous in his praise of the Potters.

He saw the Potters as a “smart team” that will run its sets repeatedly until it gets the shot it wants. He says Bob Becker “is too smart” to be fooled by the Peorians’ second-half decision to give Lawson the ball at point guard. ”They went to their zone,” he said. Asked to compare this season’s Potters to those of, say, a year ago, Edwards said, “I see them back down to State again.”

Morton High School’s Lady Potters 62, Peoria Manual 31.

What the Potters did tonight is what good teams are supposed to do to bad teams. They made them look worse.

For the 15th time in a row, the Potters have won a state tournament game, this one their regional opener. “Everybody got their feet wet,” Bob Becker, the Potters’ coach, said. To win the Class 3A state championship for a third straight season – only the second three-peat in Illinois history – Becker’s team now has to win six more games, one in the regional, two in the sectional, one in the super-sectional, and two at Redbird Arena.

I’ll give you more about the game in a minute. First I want to talk about a picture. I’m not a photographer. But when there’s a picture that demands to be taken, my magic iPhone gets the job done. So I asked Brooke Bisping, the Morton assistant coach, to stay a minute after the game. Then I asked her sister, the senior star, Brandi, “Do me a favor?” To complete the portrait, I put the sisters on either side of Cindy Bumgarner. We should call the picture, “Potters History.” Do the math. In their 12 seasons, the Bispings and Bumgarner have scored 5,747 points and taken 2,857 rebounds (with Brandi still chipping in).

You know the Bispings. But Bumgarner?

Maybe all you need to know about Bumgarner is what Jane Miller Sands said tonight. Jane was a Peoria Journal Star sportswriter for approximately forever until she ran off to marry a Texan four years ago. In her sportswriting days, Jane saw lots of games at the Potterdome. So tonight, serendipity at work, a coincidence of travel plans brought Jane and Bumgarner together at the Potters regional tournament opener. And here’s what Jane said on first spotting the hero she had written so much about: “Cindy! My goodness! Cindy!”

Jane’s enthusiasm was born of more than a chance meeting after all these years. It also was also a measure of what she thought of Bumgarner, the player. Perhaps the best of all Potters, Bumgarner was a 6-foot-2 perimeter player who could work inside. In four seasons, she averaged a double-double. As a senior in 1984, she scored 24.4 points a game, still the program record. Later an All-American at Indiana University, Bumgarner is now an assistant vice chancellor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Anyone who goes to a Potters’ game sees Cindy’s father, John, and mother, Karin, always at midcourt opposite the Potters’ bench. I’ve seen them there for seven seasons now. They were joined tonight by Cindy, who had come to the heartland for a reunion of her Indiana team. I was happy to meet her – so happy, in fact, that I put her to work. “After the game,” I said, “I’ll be back for a comment from you.”

I figured I’d need help because, truth to tell, one’s imagination has limits. The Potters are 28-2 this season and they’re 94-8 over the last three seasons. How many ways can a sportswriter avoid long dissertations on yet another victory achieved by the superior team playing well? Many a night I have disgressed, delayed, and put off game accounts. I have riffed on pep bands that murder music. I have questioned the eyesight of men in zebra shirts. I have suggested that the entire city of Dunlap up and moves to a new location every winter, the better to keep me lost in the dark wilds of Route 91.

I knew I’d need help tonight. I watched Peoria Manual warm up. They had some big players. By big I mean big. One big came decorated with tattoos. I noticed they moved their bigness without grace, elegance, or quickness. Those kind of bigs are not bigs the Potters much worry much about. The Potters are not big and they move with grace, elegance, and quickness. But I didn’t want to define in painful detail the many ways in which Peoria Manual might be better off playing Parchesi. So I asked Cindy to be ready to save me.

This was another game in which it was only a matter of time. That’s because Morton has a lot of basketball players and Manual doesn’t. A 17-2 run gave the Potters a 25-10 lead late in the first half. A 14-1 run gave them a 50-22 lead early in the fourth quarter. Those two runs – 31-3 in about a quarter’s worth of game clock – were demonstration of Morton’s dominance built on relentless effort at both ends by a team that goes eight players deep. Not only did the Potters’ pressing, trapping defense discombobulate Manual all night long, Morton scored from sets, on the run, and seven times on 3-pointers.

Tenley Dowell led the Potters’ scoring with 16. Bisping had 12. (Her 8 rebounds moved her career total to 1,040, now 7 behind Bumgarner’s record). Courtney Jones scored 9, Josi Becker 8, Jacey Wharram 4, Caylie Jones 4, Lindsey Dullard 4, Kassidy Shurman 3, and Maddy Becker 2.

So, Cindy Bumgarner, one of the all-time best Potters, how’d today’s Potters look to you?

“They played hard all night, they didn’t lose a step when new players came in, they moved the ball well,” she said. “They were a TEAM.”

He wanted his two seniors, Brandi Bisping and Jacey Wharram, to get one more standing ovation on a Senior Night electric with ovations. So the coach, Bob Becker, sent both into the game with 3 minutes and 1 second to play. “You’ll come out in 30 seconds,” he said. Becker gave them one instruction. He said, “Do something sensational.”

So when they came out, Bisping and Wharram, already sensational for four years, remembered hearing a suggestion from someone on the bench. Someone suggested a way they could make their final exit a piece of grand theater, forever memorable, a story that will live in Lady Potter lore.

Here comes Bisping toward the bench in that high-stepping lope of hers. Then she’s slowing down . . . and she’s turning sideways . . . and she’s tilting her body . . . and she throws herself down to the court where . . .

CARTWHEEL!!

Bisping and Wharram are seniors in high school and for that moment they are little kids again doing happy, laughing CARTHWEELS on the floor, after which they hug each other and bounce over to Becker for more hugs.

On this smiling night, the Morton High School Lady Potters defeated Washington High, 56-22. Already the Mid-Illini Conference champions, the Potters finished the league season undefeated, 14-0. They are 27-2 overall going into next week’s regional when they begin a quest for their third straight Class 3A state championship – a three-peat done only once in Illinois history, by Lombard Montini in 2010-11-12.

This victory was yet one more built on unrelenting pressure at both ends of the court. Good heavens, poor Washington. The visitors might have thought they had a chance. They trailed only 9-6 late in the first quarter. But anyone who has seen the Potters play – especially seen them lately — knows one thing to be true. It. Won’t. Be. Close. Much. Longer.

With 24 seconds left in the quarter, freshman Lindsey Dullard dropped in a layup. Washington’s in-bound pass was stolen by Courtney Jones, who moved the ball to Tenley Dowell for a short jumper on which she was fouled. In eight seconds, the lead had gone to 14-6.

Done? Nope. On a three-shot possession 45 seconds into the second quarter, Bisping wound up making two free throws. While Washington flailed on offense – twice hitting the bottom of the backboard with shots, twice throwing up air-balls on 3’s – Morton continued its run.

Kassidy Shurman a 3. Bisping a powered-up layup on another three-shot possession. Bisping another layup and two free throws.

Remember when it was 9-6? Suddenly, it was 25-6. It happened on a 16-0 run in 4:34. I used to play a game with buddies on press row. We called it, “Got enough to win?” Meaning, can the good team beat the mediocre team without scoring another point? At 25-6 and with 2 ½ quarters to play, Morton already had enough points to win.

It was 27-8 at halftime, 42-17 after three, and a 13-0 run in the first three minutes of the fourth quarter made it 55-17.

All of it was remarkable, which is no surprise, for the Potters are now playing at a high level. But if I had to choose two seconds as the most extraordinary two seconds of the night, maybe even my favorite two seconds of the entire season, those two seconds came at 7:06 and 7:05 of the third quarter.

Those two seconds starred Brandi Bisping. Of course.

At 7:06 she made a 17-foot jumper. No. Wait. To Bisping’s confusion and to the surprise of anyone with eyes, a referee ruled that Bisping was fouled before the shot. Instead of two points, instead of the and-one free throw, the Potters put the ball in play from the baseline. It came in to Bisping. And here’s what Bisping did at the 7:05 mark.

From halfway up the right side of the arc, she threw in a 3.

Of course.

More than once, I’ve called Bisping a warrior. Now that we’ve seen her for the last time in the Potterdome, I’ll do it again. She is unafraid. When the challenge is greatest, she is at her best. She does not bring high energy to her work – she brings nuclear energy. Forget the scoring, forget the rebounding, forget the strength she brings to the bruising work in the paints; lots of people have physical talent. Bisping does the harder thing: by the examples of her fearlessness and enthusiasm, she raises a good team to greatness.

(Besides all that, she’s an interviewer’s delight, as on an occasion when she seemed near exhaustion after single-handedly beating U High. I asked if she could possibly have gotten one more rebound. Eye contact unwavering, she said, “If I wanted it.” I believed her 1000 percent.)

Speaking of Bisping at a post-game celebration for the seniors, Becker also moved between admiration and hyperbole. He upped the ante with this: “A strong argument could be made that Brandi is the very best Potter ever to put on the uniform.” She is the second Potter ever to score more than 1,000 points and get more than 1,000 rebounds. (Bumgarner the other.)

If Bisping is the rare talent that comes along once a decade, Becker counts Wharram as the prototypical Lady Potter, “a great teammate, a positive force always,” to quote the coach. Becker said he first saw Wharram as a “cherubic point third-grade point guard bringing the ball up the court.” She grew into a 5-foot-11 post player, a good defender and strong rebounder who admits she once thought she’d never make the varsity. Yet, by dint of hard work, Becker said, “Jacey made herself a starter on a 27-2 team and an all-star in her role.”

Wharram called the night “bittersweet,” for her time in the Potterdome was over, and Bisping called it “unforgettable,” all the games, the practices, camps, bus rides, all that work all those years, “all my teammates helping make me the person I am.”

Bisping led Morton’s scoring tonight with 14 (and had 9 rebounds, giving her 1,032 for her career, now 17 behind Bumgarner, the record-holder). Dowell and Josi Becker had 10 points apiece, Dullard 7, Wharram 6, Caylie Jones 5, Shurman 3, Olivia Remmert 1.

(A note on Dullard: the 6-foot-1 freshman blocked 6 shots. Only two Potters ever have blocked more than 6 in a game – Sarah Livingston, who 9 times blocked at least 7, and Kali Birkey, who had 7 once.)

What a sweet night it was, Senior Night, with parents escorting Bisping and Wharram to center court for a standing ovation by one of the largest crowds ever for a Lady Potters game, maybe a thousand people there, students, family, parents, grandparents, fans. I swear, Morton’s pep band must have had 100 musicians on stage, everyone armed with brass. Loved ’em.

Becker narrated the seniors’ pre-game ceremonial walk to midcourt. Of Wharram he said, “Jacey has matured into a leader and a consistent positive voice for our team. . . . Words of wisdom from Jacey: ‘You don’t have to play on varsity as a freshman. To be a good player, just work hard and you’ll get there!’”

Of Bisping the coach said, “She has amassed 1,597 points and 1,023 rebounds to help lead her teams to a record of 118-13 . . . Among Brandi’s favorite basketball memories is winning back-to-back state championships and making Coach buy her South African lobster tail for $60. Brandi’s words of wisdom: ‘A vision without action is just a dream.’”

Say what? Lobster tail? Stay tuned. I’ll get to the bottom of that story.

Morton High School’s Lady Potters tonight defeated Canton High, 69-44, and I’ll have something to say about that right after having something to say about a thing I’d never seen before.

These five guys came in to Canton’s Alice Ingersoll Gymnasium. They were all dressed in black. One dude wore a gorilla mask. Each of the teenage boys, for of course they were teenage boys, carried a large poster board. Whatever was written on the boards, they didn’t let us see. We saw only the blank side. Clearly, the five guys had mischief in mind, for don’t teenage boys always have mischief in mind?

In a surprise to anyone suspecting the boys had a plan to distract the Lady Potters, the introduction of the visitors’ starting lineup went off without a hitch. The boys sat silent.

But in Canton’s turn, the boys moved to seats across from the Lady Giants’ bench. There they stood with their boards,, still turned blank-side out – until the public address system announcer called out Canton’s fifth starter, “At another guard, sophomore CASSIDY FAWCETT!”

As Cassidy Fawcett ran onto the court, through a gauntlet of her teammates, the five guys turned their boards so they could be read.

And Fawcett saw . . .

“P R O M ?”

So, at halftime, I went to the five guys.

“I’m an old sportswriter,” I said, “but I’d never seen that. Whose idea?”

“Mine,” said Caleb Collier, who is an 18-year-old Canton senior and was not, in case his parents read this, the one in the gorilla mask.

“Good idea,” I said.

“Unique,” he said.

As to Cassidy Fawcett’s response, there was a game to be played first.

Not much of a game. Six weeks ago, Morton crushed Canton, 64-28. The Lady Giants were more competitive this time, but still – the Lady Potters are so much the class of the Mid-Illini Conference, now 13-0 with one league game to play (and 26-2 overall), that with Canton even more competitive the Lady Giants still got crushed, by 25 this time. The Canton coach, Layne Langhoff, shook his head. “Morton is just so disruptive,” he said.

Look, for instance, at the way Morton disrupts folks in the first three minutes of each quarter. The Morton coach, Bob Becker, wants his team to dominate in those minutes. Tonight, in those four three-minute segments, Morton outscored Canton, 8-2, 8-5, 9-5, and 9-4. That’s 34-16.

And look at the way they scored the 34 – from inside, from outside, on the run, out of sets. Look at just one of those segments, the three minutes beginning the third quarter, a time when a good team can bend a mediocre team to its will for the rest of the night. From a 34-19 halftime lead, the Potters moved to 43-24 this way . . .

First Lindsey Dullard scored on a put-back at 7:25. . . . Trapped in the deep left corner with nowhere to pass, Tenley Dowell decided to shoot – a 17-footer at 6:42 . . . Working off a steal in the Potters’ full-court press, Brandi Bisping dropped in a layup at 6:34 . . . at which time there came this roar from the Canton bench, Langhoff shouting, “TimeOUT!”

The stop was to no avail. Morton rolling . . . Josi Becker scored on a fast-break layup. . . . Then Dullard used a crafty shot-fake for a foul and a free throw. . . . In the three-minute, segment Morton had outscored Canton, 9-5. . . .And a lead that late in the second quarter had been only eight points – at 27-19 – now had grown to 19 at 43-24 with 5:20 to play in the third quarter. Game Over.

I liked a lot about that third quarter. I really liked the Potters’ starting lineup: Becker and Kassidy Shurman with the ball, Dowell and Dullard on the wings, Bisping in the paint.

Coincidence or a natural rise in confidence after a season’s experience, the 6-foot-1 freshman Dullard has played her best varsity basketball in the last two weeks after also suiting up – for the first time all year – to play a quarter in the junior varsity games. The ball-fake that drew a foul, a little thing that wins games, was one sign of Dullard’s growing comfort and assurance on the court. She scored 17 points, her career high. Four came on offensive rebounds. Six came on 3-pointers. Of her pair of 3’s, Dullard said, “I got my groove back, I think.”

Becker led Morton’s scoring with 19, Dowell had 12, and Bisping 10. Courtney Jones had 4, Bridget Wood 3, Jacey Wharram 2, and Caylie Jones 2.

Bisping had 10 rebounds, giving her 1,023 for her career, closing in on the record 1,049 of Cindy Bumgarner. Wharram also had 10 rebounds tonight.

As for the prom . . .

Cassidy Fawcett didn’t know what the boys were up to. “But I saw the signs when I came out in the introductions, and I knew it was Caleb asking,” she said.

So? A date?

“Yes,” she said.

And when Cassidy Fawcett left the gym tonight, she left carrying the five signs.