Josi Becker was laughing. First, though, she was sprinting past her team’s bench. Sprinting back on defense, she gave the ball-handler neither time nor room to breathe let alone make a rational decision. Becker hounded the poor girl to such distraction that the girl went this way and the ball went that way. And Becker’s father, the coach, said, “YESSS!” It was about then that Josi Becker looked at the coach, her father, and laughed.

“What,” I asked later, “were you laughing about?”

She was mystified.

“I don’t know,” she said.

I put a time on the moment. “Right at the end of the first quarter . . . ”

“I really don’t remember,” she said, and that’s a perfect answer when a guy’s asking you to remember one of a thousand seconds in a kaleidoscopic, shape-shifting game that asks its players to come up instantly with thousands of answers to questions of geometry and physics.

Ah, yes. Yes, I hear you. I hear you saying quit it. It’s not that complicated/ Get the ball, throw it in the hole.

The best players do make it look easy. Sometimes, as in the Morton High School Lady Potters victory tonight – 60-45 over Limestone High, giving the Potters the Mid-Illini Conference championship – in such easy victories, with one team better than the other in every way, the game does seem simple.

It’s not. Look, if you will, at one possession by the Potters. One of its 50 possessions in the game. One possession against a Limestone zone defense that has been good enough to make the Rockets the second-best team in the Mid-Illini (8-3 coming in tonight).

It’s one possession that lasts maybe 30 seconds. It is a thing of basketball beauty, the game played the way it’s played by basketball’s best team, the Golden State Warriors. The ball keeps moving. No one holds it longer than a beat. No one bounces it twice. (Except Steph Curry, who can do whatever the hell he wants.) Soon enough, as the ball keeps moving, it finds the hole – as the Potters did when . . .

Brandi Bisping in-bounds it from under her own hoop. Gives it to Josi Becker, who moves it up the left-side arc to Kassidy Shurman. Back to Becker and into the paint to Jacey Wharram. Who kicks it out to Shurman, who thinks a 3 but is hurried. She hurls it cross-court to Tenley Dowell. Two or three steps in, then back to Shurman. That’s the seventh pass of the possession. It’s not the last. Shurman tries Wharram inside again. No go. Out to Becker, back to Bisping, to Shurman. Now to Dowell, whose missed 3 is rebounded by Bisping and given back to Dowell. Now the ball finds the hole, a driving Dowell layup off the glass.

Simple?

All five Potters had touches. They made 13 passes in maybe 30 seconds.

Beautiful.

Dowell’s layup gave Morton a 20-point lead at 41-21 with 2:54 to play in the third quarter. The Potters were up by as many as 24 early in the fourth quarter before the reserves coasted in.

As efficient as the Potters were offensively, they were better on defense. “We were really good defensively for long parts of the game,” Bob Becker said. And if his team’s defense pleased this coach who loves defense – who loves it, certainly, when his daughter takes time to laugh on the defensive end – we should know this by now: that defense was really, really good tonight.

Again, as always, and I repeat myself because the truth doesn’t change, the Potters contested every pass and every movement toward the basket. Against Morton’s full-court pressure, the poor, poor Limestone girls had to have considered it a victory to get the ball into their end of the court. And then the discombobulation truly began in what I have decided to call “turnover-by-attrition.” That is, against Morton’s defense, sooner or later, unable to make a good play, you are going to make a bad play. I kept track in the first half alone: Limestone was called for three charges, twice traveled, and once went over-and-back.

Becker’s white board reminded his players: “In 1st 3:00 Set the Tone.” Three minutes in, the Potters led, 7-2, on a Dowell floater, a Josi Becker 3, and another driving bucket by Dowell. At quarter’s end, 15-4. Josi laughed. Game Over.

Dowell led Morton’s scoring with 15. Three more Potters had 10 apiece: Becker, Lindsey Dullard, and Caylie Jones. Shurman and Bisping each had 6, Maddy Becker 3. Again good from outside, the Potters made 7 3’s, giving them 193 for the season, a 7.1 per game average.

Bisping had 10 rebounds and now has 1,013 for her career. The Potters’ all-time leading rebounder is Cindy Bumgarner, who had 1,049.

Speaking of Bob Becker, as we were, let me say one thing more . . .

Two days ago, the Illinois High School Association named its girls’ basketball Coach of the Year for the 2015-16 season. Had anyone asked me to guess the winner of that award, I’d have said, “I have no idea. But I know a guy whose team went 33-3 and won the state championship at the Class 3A level. In fact, his teams went 33-3 back-to-back and won back-to-back state championships. Pretty good. Name’s Bob Becker.”

The IHSA girls Coach of the Year was Tom Dooley.

You don’t know Tom Dooley and neither do I, but he has to be good. At Moweaqua, he coached the Class 1A state champions two years ago. Last season his Central A&M High School team reached the championship game again, only to lose. In those two seasons his teams went 33-1 and 32-2. Moweaqua is a dot on the map just south of Decatur, the kind of map-dot that I grew up in, a map-dot that will remember those Tom Dooley teams forever.

This year not so much, 13-12 so far. Becker’s team is 25-2.

The Kindreds came to Virginia in the 1770s from Northumberlandshire, England, on the country’s northeast border with Scotland. My mother’s side, the Holzaepfels, worked in Germany’s coal mines before emigrating in 1880 to Logan County, Illinois, where they again dug coal out of the earth. Maybe this has nothing to do with a girls basketball game. But in the Potterdome tonight, I kept thinking about where we come from. All of us, Americans. All of us once, foreigners.

It was Pink Night. The game – won by the Morton High School Lady Potters over Pekin, 68-50 – was an occasion for raising money for the Illinois Cancer Care Foundation. Like many in the crowd, I wore a T-shirt with the words, “Hooping for a Cure. Mama Schultz, 1961-2014.” On the wall at the visitor’s end, these signs:

OverCome
ThroUgh
CouRage
&StrEngth

They called Mary Schultz “Mama” not only because she had two daughters playing for the Lady Potters. For years every Potter was her daughter. Mrs. Schultz was one of the parents who make high school athletics worth doing. She did whatever her daughters’ teams needed done. Kept the official scorebook, arranged dinners, decorated the Potterdome for Pink Nights before her own cancer. Gone three years now, there she was tonight. We saw her on the gym’s video screen, again doing what she had done so many times before, singing the Star Spangled Banner. And it was lovely.

Such a cliché to speak of “pure Americana.” But words become clichés because time certifies the power of their truth. To see a small-town high school gymnasium alive with cheerleaders and dancers, basketball players, mothers, fathers, grandparents . . . to know they kicked in a couple thousand dollars for a raffle and a 50-50 drawing and a bake sale (with the players pointing out which cookies they’d personally decorated) . . . everyone hooping for a cure, the crowd a sea of sun-shiny pink . . . to hear Mama Schultz’s lovely voice, reminding us what the night was about . . . only in America.

For five minutes tonight, a good Pekin team competed. It came in with a 17-6 record, 7-3 in the Mid-Illini Conference. It led, 14-12 at 3:01 of the first quarter. But then, as is their habit, the Potters went on an extended run of dominance. It gave them a 27-14 lead. They had outscored Pekin, 15-0, in 3 minutes and 28 seconds.

They did it the way they always do it to lesser teams. They created relentless pressure at both ends. They contested every pass and sent help to block any Pekin movement toward the basket. Offensivfely, they were perpetual motion, creating space both inside and out. Few teams at any level can maintain their poise against a superior opponent that dares you to make even the most fundamental of basketball plays. However small that number of teams might be, it is miniscule at the girls high school level. In winning back-to-back state championships and building a 24-2 record this season – that’s 90-8 in three seasons so far – the Potters have done it with an unique blend of athleticism and pressure. They first wear you out physically, then psychologically.

One example: Pekin’s all-conference star, Sidney Diekhoff , scored 6 points of her team’s first 10 points in the game’s first four minutes, helping it to that 14-12 lead. But she didn’t score again for 17 minutes. By then Pekin trailed 49-31. Defended man-to-man by four different Potters, Diekhoff wound up with 11 points.

Let’s do play-by-play of the Potters’ game-turning 15-0 run:

Brandi Bisping, a layup. Lindsey Dullard, a free throw. Caylie Jones, a nifty reverse layup. Josi Becker, a breakaway with a steal. Dullard a 3-pointer after stuffing a shooter. Tenley Dowell a 3. Bisping another power-move layup.

Morton’s lead grew to 16 points, 41-25, before Pekin made a move that brought them within 10 at the end of three quarters, 53-43. Thoughts of closing the gap went away quickly. Morton scored the fourth quarter’s first 10 points in 4 ½ minutes.

Those points came this way: a right corner 3 by Kassidy Shurman, another Caylie Jones layup (off a bullet of a pass from Josi Becker at the top of the key), a 3 by Bisping (back at nearly full speed after the mono), and a Jacey Wharram layup off a Becker bounce pass in the paint. Morton 63-43. Game Over.

Almost incidentally, the victory assured Morton of a share of the Mid-Illini championship. It is 11-0 in league play and everyone else has at least three defeats.

Bisping led Morton’s scoring with 22. Dowell had 13, Dullard 9, Shurman 8, Caylie Jones and Josi Becker 4 each, Maddy Becker 3, Wharram and Megan Gold 2 each, and Courtney Jones 1.

Again good from outside, the Potters made 10 3’s – by five different players – and now have 186 3’s in 26 games. That’s 7.1 a game, 22 points a game from behind the arc. Their first four field goals tonight were 3’s.

I went to the Potterdome tonight for all the usual reasons, and one more. At a New York airport today, some Muslims were handcuffed and detained because the White House had ordered a ban of Americans returning to America if they were Muslims. I went to the Potterdome for a small, wonderful dose of real America.

I learned that Brandi Bisping’s ancestors, on both her father’s and mother’s sides, arrived from Germany in 1880. Kassidy Shurman’s family tree reaches into Sweden, Germany, and Lithuania. Centuries ago, Jacey Wharram’s people left a town in England named Wharram Percy.

After the game, I said to the Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, “Here’s the oddest question you’ll be asked anytime soon. Where’d the Beckers originate?”

“Whoa,” he said. “Let’s ask Mom and Dad.”

The coach’s father, Robert Cantley Becker Jr., said, “The story always was that they ‘escaped the hangman’ in England. And they wound up fighting in the Revolutionary War.”

Hooray for immigrants.

I have driven to Dunlap High School seven times in seven basketball seasons. Tonight, for the first time, I found the school without a single navigational turnover, not even a curlicue U-turn. Piece of cake, ‘twas. You go west on I-74 to War Memorial, north on State Route 91 to a left turn at the Alta sign to a right turn at a four-way stop. Don’t pull into the Dunlap middle school (been there, done that). Keep motoring until you see a gas station on the left, make two quick rights, and, sha-zam!, there it is, Dunlap High. Tonight, I was Christopher Columbus landing in the New World.

And then someone in the gymnasium said, “Did you come the new way? So much quicker.”

A new way?

Oh, God.

Once the basketball began, it was the same ol’ same ol’. In my seven seasons, I have seen the Morton High School Lady Potters defeat Dunlap 14 straight times. Tonight’s score: 66-24. A 42-point victory is always a good thing, and this one was especially good considering that the Potters’ lead was only 18-14 until the last 39 seconds of the first half. So Morton won the game’s last 17 minutes, 48-10. That happens when a really good team rips the heart out of a mediocre team and stomps that sucker flat.

The Morton coach, Bob Becker, had been concerned that his back-to-back state champions, currently ranked No. 2 in Class 3A, had allowed lesser teams to stick around. After two hard-earned victories in the Galesburg tournament last weekend, Becker wanted to “polish the machine,” raise its rev rate, smooth away the wrinkles of unforced turnovers, get teams down and “put them away.”

All that, the Potters did tonight. They did it most sensationally late in the first half and early in second. In 3 minutes and 4 seconds, they outscored Dunlap, 17-0. (Fun with math: At 17-0 every 184 seconds, Morton wins, 177-0.)

The 17-0 run started when Dunlap made the mistake of fouling Brandi Bisping on a 3-point try. She made all three free throws with 38.9 seconds left in the first half. Morton up 21-14. At the buzzer, stopping at the arc on a fast break, Tenley Dowell threw in a nothing-but-net 3. Morton up 24-14.

Then came 11 straight points to open the third quarter, this way:

Two free throws by Bisping. A Josi Becker steal and fast break layup. A Bisping steal, fast break layup, and one. Kassidy Shurman turns a Bisping rebound and court-length pass into a layup. Dowell a steal and a runaway layup.

All done in 2 minutes and 25 seconds.

And all done convincingly at both ends. Morton’s trapping defense left the poor Dunlap ballhandlers discombobulated. Its run ‘n gun offense scored at the rim and from the 3-point line (7 more 3’s, the team’s season average). As always, the Potters were relentless in attacking with and without the ball. Going eight players deep – some teams are happy to be two deep – the Potters ran the Dunlap people into dispiriting exhaustion. One of the Eagles, staggering on a drive to the basket, got rid of the ball so awkwardly that it entered the net from below. (Nothing but net, the hard way.)

Becker liked what he saw. “As Coach (assistant Bill Davis) told the team, ‘We played like the No. 2 team in the state tonight,’” Becker said. “If we can bottle that up, we can be really, really good.”

Morton is now 23-2 for the season, 10-0 in the Mid-Illini Conference. Dunlap is 12-11, 5-5.

For the first time in a while, the Potters had four players in double figures. Bisping led with 19, Josi Becker had 14, and Shurman and Dowell 10 apiece. Jacey Wharram and Courtney Jones had 4 each, Bridget Wood 3, and Caylie Jones 2.

As for that “new way” to find Dunlap, a kindly couple offered to guide me from the high school to the more direct, shorter, quicker route back to Morton.

“Follow us,” the gentleman said.

Then, knowing the trials and tribulations of my travels in the flatlands above Grand Prairie Mall, he added what he must have considered essential information.

“We’re in the Ford truck,” he said. “You do know a Ford from a Chevy, right?”

Oh, God.

So this is what it sounded like from Peoria High fans. “Give that girl an OSCAR!” The girl was flat out on the floor, face down, unmoving. The girl had been bludgeoned across the bridge of her nose with an elbow thrown by a Peoria High player. Face down in the paint, with a gaggle of Peoria High fans screaming that she was faking it, Brandi Bisping didn’t move even as play swirled around and over her. I heard my voice. It said, “Stop the damned game.”

Play stopped only when the ball went out of bounds. Only then did Bisping sit up. She thought, “If I try to stand up, I’ll pass out.” She sat until someone helped her up. She walked off. She had the slow, wobbling, fixed-gaze gait of a busted-up fighter. In a frenetic, ferocious game played at maximum speed with mercy neither given nor asked by either side, Bisping already had been cut and bleeding, had been cracked across the forehead, and had been knocked to the floor a dozen other times.

Now, with 9.6 seconds to play, the Morton High School Lady Potters were near victory in a Martin Luther King Winter Classic game at Galesburg’s John Thiel Gymnasium.

Bisping walked to the Morton bench and sat there through a timeout called by coach Bob Becker.

She didn’t sit long.

To run an in-bounds play with 6.1 seconds to play, Becker wanted Bisping handling the throw-in.

When she came running to take the ball from a referee, those Peoria High fans again turned to sarcasm.

“Praise God, you made it,” is what Bisping heard them say.

She raised both arms to them and she looked at them, none having bled this day, none hammered in the head twice, none about to enjoy a victory well-earned.

Brandi Bisping heard herself shout to them, “Yes, praise God.”

Some days, y’know, it’s just a pleasure to be on the same planet with these Lady Potters, let alone in the same building.

With Bisping scoring her team’s last two points on free throws for a six-point lead with 39.4 seconds to play, the Potters defeated Peoria High, 54-53. The margin was that thin only because Peoria threw in an uncontested 3-pointer at the buzzer.

The game turned in a 70-second stretch of the third quarter. Peoria High led at halftime, 30-26, on the scoring of sensational guard Jailynn Lawson and post player Mackenzie Jenkins. But Lawson left in the second quarter with a sprained ankle. And Jenkins lost her way against Morton’s defense – especially against Bisping’s unyielding presence.

It was Jenkins, angry and frustrated, who threw the elbow, while clearing a rebound, that flattened Bisping. Bisping’s game-long strong answer: her 12 rebounds. She characterized the game as “physical.” Peoria coach Meechie Edwards called it “hard-fought.” Bob Becker said, “There was blood in the coach’s box.” From three rows up in the bleachers, I saw a title fight.

With Lawson gone and Jenkins getting worn out, the Potters went on that 70-second, 10-0 run midway through the third quarter. They were down, 32-29, when Kassidy Shurman tied it with a 3-pointer from the left corner. Tenley Dowell followed with a back-cut layup off a Bisping pass, with a free throw added. Then Josi Becker – a dynamo at point guard, bringing the ball upcourt at max speed against max pressure all day – dropped in a fast-break layup. She added a 17-footer to give Morton a 39-32 lead with 2:55 to play in the third.

Suddenly, the Potters were in charge. In the game’s last 11 minutes, Peoria once moved within two points but never closer. At 43-41, Dowell made a 3-pointer. At 46-43, the sophomore pulled off another of her imaginative driving layups, somehow kissing the ball off the glass after letting it first slip from her hands in mid-air. And added one. It was 49-43.

By then the Potters had established their refusal to lose. They were again victims of their own errors, losing the ball on unforced errors more often than any coach likes. Too often they seemed to pass where someone used to be or where they thought someone would be. “We need to polish the machine,” Becker said. “But I’d rather win a game and learn from it than lose a game and learn from it.”

The indispensable Josi Becker led Morton’s scoring with 14. Dowell had 12. Shurman had 8, Bisping 7, Jacey Wharram 5, Courtney Jones 4, Lindsey Dullard and Caylie Jones 2 each.

Oh, one thing more.

I waited outside the Morton locker room to talk to Bisping.

“She’ll be out in a little bit,” one player told me.

I figured she was exhausted.

“She’s still in there,” another said.

Maybe she was woozy.

Then another played said, “She’s ordering Jimmy John’s.”

Never heard that one before of a star late to meet the press. But, hey, this is not the NBA. This is better. Turns out it was Brandi Bisping’s duty, as a senior, as a captain, as leader, to gather orders from her teammates and put in a call to Jimmy John’s for lunch between today’s games at 10:30 and 5:30.

Last seen this morning, Bisping was headed for the team bus carrying a cardboard box likely full of Jimmy John’s ham, swiss, roast beef, provolone, tuna, turkey, and genoa salami decorated with lettuce, tomato, mayo, sauce, and, to quote the Galesburg menu, “a real tasty Italian vinaigrette.”

As for the afternoon game, won by Morton over Peoria Notre Dame, 69-52, Becker said, “We did some really good things and we made some really bone-headed plays.” He was concerned some but not all that much with the Potters’ allowing Notre Dame to move from 15 points down in the first half to within 10 late in the fourth quarter. “These are the kind of teams we’ll be playing in the regional and sectional,” he said. “And we can’t let good teams stick around. We’ve got to put them away.”

Morton is now 22-2 for the year. In their back-to-back state championship seasons, the Potters were 21-3 at this point a year ago and 22-2 the year before.

Dowell led Morton against Notre Dame with 20 points. Bisping had 17 (and 8 more rebounds). Dullard had 8, Courtney Jones 6. Shurman, Josie Becker, and Caylie Jones had 5 each. Maddy Becker had 3.

So Morton finished the MLK with a 4-1 record. No one yet knows who won the tournament. There’s a game Monday. In seven years, Morton has won the thing six times and is now 33-2 all-time.

I mentioned the time between games. The team rested at a lake house at Oak Run. Here’s a note on another way to kill time.

We walked to the Galesburg fieldhouse for a game there. The fieldhouse is a quarter mile from Thiel. One player’s grandmother walked further. She couldn’t find a door open. Up stairs, down stairs, all around. Finally she saw referees inside. They let her in. “I’ll never say another bad word about referees,” she said, and they said, “We’ve heard that before.”

I offered her a breath-saving ride back to Thiel. I led the way to my Jeep. There I tossed some papers out of the back seat and waited. Then I waited more. Then I got out of my Jeep to look for her and her partner, another grandmother. I spotted them in a car. Not my car. It was red, and my car is red, but the women had climbed into someone else’s red car. “I wondered, it was really messy with soda cans,” the first lost grandmother said later. “I did think a sportswriter would be neater.”

We finally assembled in my car for the drive back to the gym. The grandmother said, “This little adventure will be our secret, right?”

Of course. I would never reveal a source’s name. But her initials are Becky Jones.

After tonight’s 80-33 victory, junior guard Kassidy Shurman said the Morton High School Lady Potters’ offense was good. “We moved the ball better, had better spacing, knew where people were.” She also said the Potters played better defense because they communicated better, they were “hedging and helping better,” they were “trapping better.” What she didn’t say was that the best thing they did was get on the bus and motor 15 minutes west on I-74. By taking Exit 96, crossing the railboard tracks and turning right, they wound up at East Peoria High School. Ah, feeling better already.

The Potters had lost their most recent game, a close one to Galesburg in which they performed uncharacteristically, not only failing to make important defensive stops but failing at their greatest strength on offense. That night the state’s No. 1-ranked Class 3A team — averaging 7 3-pointers a game – made none, nada, nothing. How bad a shooting night was it? So bad they were able to get off only 3 3-point tries. Instead of their customary 23 points a game from behind the arc, they got zip, zilch, zero.

If anyone believed that off-night would have lingering ill effects, the Potters offered an emphatic answer: NOT ON YOUR LIFE.

Tonight, the Potters shot it 31 times from out there.

They made 13 of them, a sensational 43 percent.

The Morton coach, Bob Becker, was a smiling man. “They put on something of a shooting clinic,” he said.

Fewer than four minutes into the game, the Potters exceeded their Galesburg production. At 4:11 of the first quarter, Josi Becker made a 3 from the deep right corner. At 2:48, from the same spot, Shurman made a 3. By then the Potters were up, 14-1. Game Over.

I say “Game Over.” You may say, “Already?” I say, “Yup.” You may say, “But . . . wait . . .three quarters to play.” I say, “So?” You may say, “Can’t be over that quick.” I say, “It was 90-33 two weeks ago. Game Over.”

Yup. Morton is now 20 and 2 on the season. East Peoria is 4 and many. In two weeks’ time, the good team has slipped past the other team by the combined score of 170-66.

Thirteen players dressed for the Potters tonight; 12 of them scored. The 13 3’s were divvied up among six players; Shurman had four, Josi Becker three, Brandi Bisping and Maddy Becker two each, and Bridget Wood and Olivia Remmert one each.

Bisping led the scoring with 16. Shurman had 12, Josi Becker 11, Maddy Becker 10, Wood 9, Tenley Dowell 8, Caylie Jones 4, Remmert 3, Jacey Wharram 2, Claire Kraft 2, Lindsey Dullard 2, Courtney Jones 1.

About 12 hours after this one ended, the Potters were to get on another bus and go northwest on I-74 to Galesburg for two more games in the Martin Luther King Winter Classic – at 10:30 in the morning against Peoria High and at 5:30 p.m. against Peoria Notre Dame.

So the cell phone rings today when I’m about five minutes from Galesburg High School, where the Morton Lady Potters would play the host Silver Streaks. Across the last six seasons, the Potters had beaten Galesburg seven straight times. But not today. They lost, 40-37. And I shoulda known.

There was the day’s fog and rain portending gloom. And there was the boy on the iPhone saying, “Hi, Grandpa.”

Uh-oh, is what I think when I hear those words. An old friend once told me not to be depressed when grandchildren move away. She said, “They’ll find you when they need money.”

So the boy has a story. He’s telling it to me in detail. Being a grandfather who has heard many stories, I don’t pay total attention to this one. I leave my car and walk toward the Galesburg school and its magnificent John Thiel Gymnasium. As I walk, waiting for the $$$ to appear in the boy’s story, my selective-hearing chooses to hear every fourth or seventh word, such as “my car,” “helping a buddy,” “a beer,” “cops,” “towed,” “impounded.”

I cut to the chase. “How much do you need?”

The boys says the tow was this much, the paperwork was that much, the $75 impound fee was ridiculous.

“How much?”

“$700.”

“Say again?”

“And I got sick in the jail overnight . . .”

At which point, my hearing shuts down all the way. I tell the boy I’ll call him after the game. I climb to the safety of the seventh row in the bleachers behind the Lady Potters bench. From there I expect to be comforted by another Potters’ victory solidifying their hold on the No. 1 ranking among the state’s 200 Class 3A teams and giving them an upper hand in Galesburg’s Martin Luther King tournament.

But, yes, I shoulda known. The Potters had played with urgency and competitive zeal two days earlier in a romp over Lincoln-Way Central, a good 4A team. Today was a new, lesser day. Today they were tight, tentative, and, no doubt, tired playing their fourth game in 67 hours.

Down 26-16 at halftime to a quick, resourceful Galesburg team that had a 17-5 record, the Potters came back late. Five times in the last quarter, they had the ball with a chance to tie or go ahead with one of the 3-pointers they’ve thrown in all season. Five times they had a chance – and they failed each time. Three times they turned it over and twice they missed shots they’ve made a thousand times. By one statistician’s count, the Potters committed 19 turnovers.

Then there is the matter of The Missing 3. The Potters lived by the 3-point shot in winning 19 of 20 games. Their coach, Bob Becker, called them a perimeter-shooting team. They were averaging 7 3’s a game. But this day they made none. They tried only three. In that second-half comeback, when heroic work is necessary to win games, the Potters didn’t even try a 3. Their longest field goal all day was a four-footer.

Meanwhile, Galesburg was 4-for-12 on 3’s in the first half. The Streaks’ dominance from outside was so obvious, and so important, that it caused me to make a note at halftime. At the top of my third-quarter play-by-play, I scribbled a prediction: “1st team to make a 3 wins.”

Galesburg’s 3 came with 52 seconds left in the third quarter and gave the Streaks a 33-24 lead.

Then Morton made its only “run,” if outscoring someone 7-0 in six minutes can be called a run. Brandi Bisping made two free throws, Josi Becker threw in a half-handed layup, and Tenley Dowell scored a layup-and-one to make it 33-31 at 5:13 of the fourth quarter.

Galesburg was staggering under Morton’s full-court defensive pressure. But an offensive rebound bucket made it 35-31 at 4:25.

Try as it might, Morton could not make the defensive stop it needed in those last minutes, nor could it make the offensive play necessary to climb to a tie.

Becker liked his team’s comeback in the second half, but said, “In the first half, they outplayed us at both ends. They dictated everything to us. . . .In a game like this one, we had way too many turnovers. . . . Galesburg’s a sectional-quality team, so we may see them again. We’ll learn from this and go on.”

Galesburg coach Evan Massey said, “We’ve beaten some good teams, but Morton is a really good team. People think of Morton as an offensive team because they all can really score, but it’s their defense that’s tough. What we did well tonight was get into our sets quicker.”

And, I thought, Galesburg handled Morton’s late-game pressure well with superb passing.

Massey laughed. “We survived,” he said.

For the third straight game, Morton had only one scorer in double figures. Bisping led with 12, Dowell and Caylie Jones had 6 each, Becker and Courtney Jones 4 each, Lindsey Dullard 3, Jacey Wharram 2.

As promised, before heading back down I-74 in the fog, I called the grandson to check on Western Union arrangements to move money from Illinois to Virginia.

“$700, right?” I said.

“It was,” he said.

“Was?”

“Now it’s been another day at the impound.”

Potters lose. A pre-game slice of sausage pizza costs me $2.50, a bottle of water $1.50, a grandson $775. A hard day at the office, folks.

Bob Becker’s coaching numbers are scary good. Two victories Saturday – 54-40 over Lincoln-Way Central and 48-40 over U High – gave him 400 in his 18th season as the Morton High School Lady Potters coach. Victories are coming at an accelerating pace. The first 100 took six seasons, the last 100 took only three seasons. All that is good, even wonderful. But I am here to tell you that numbers are lifeless things, ink on paper, pixels on your screen. You can learn more about Becker’s work by noticing a player’s smile that lit up the Potterdome today.

The smile belonged to Tenley Dowell. She’s a sophomore. She’s 5-foot-11 and she’s very good with the ball. She can score from outside and she can score from inside and she can score on the break with either hand. Against Lincoln-Way today, she broke out in smiles and not because of anything she did on offense but what she did defensively.

I had to look twice. In the heat of play at full speed, who smiles? Contesting a pass, who has time to smile? But there she was, Tenley Dowell aglow. She was a girl having the time of her basketball life, trapping a ball-handler, arms everywhere, closing off every option, ruining that poor girl’s day.

So I asked, why the smiles?

“It’s fun, trapping, stealing the ball,” she said.

But sometimes, I said, you didn’t steal it, you just made it possible for someone else to steal the bad pass you forced.

“YEAH,” Dowell said.

Two things by which we might measure Bob Becker’s career . . .

1. He won his 100th game in his sixth season, 200th in his 10th season, and 300th in his 14th. His Potters have won the last two Class 3A state championships. After back-to-back 33-3 seasons, they’re 19-1 this season. They’ve won 85 of their last 92 games.

2. And Tenley Dowell, a really good offensive player in a game that glorifies scorers, is having so much fun on defense that she sometimes breaks into a smile. That, my friends, is coaching.

Small wonder, then, that Lincoln-Way Central’s coach, Dave Campanile, saw all that and more in his team’s defeat: “The biggest thing was Morton’s pressure on the ball. We turned it over too much. And then they got hot, they got out on the break, they scored in transition. They were having a good time. They were passionate on both sides of the ball.”

Unlike the night before when Morton played as if entitled to victory against a mediocre Metamora team, the Potters this morning played with the urgency born of real competition. Lincoln-Way Central is a 4A team that came in with an 11-6 record. Properly concerned, Becker had written three pre-game messages on his whiteboard, telling his Lady Potters:

“Make them uncomfortable”
“Relentless”
“Windex”

At jangling a poor girl’s nerves with unforgiving pressure at both ends, the Lady Potters are superb; there would be no problem in discomfiting the Lincoln-Way Central people. But to suggest the Potters wipe clean the glass, the coach seemed to have asked too much of his rebounders, struggling of late.

Early in the second quarter, Lincoln-Way Central led, 18-14. About then, as in many Potters games, their relentless pressure – attacking on both offense and defense – produced a 19-2 run that, after halftime, became a 34-8 domination. “Make them uncomfortable”? The Potters made them crazy. In that time I made this note “Tenley laffing on def.”

We should give that extraordinary 34-8 run a little play-by-play on the scoring . . .

First came two free throws by Brandi Bisping, then a layup by her. Dowell followed with a steal and layup. Josi Becker a 3, then two 3’s by Bisping 43 seconds apart. A Becker steal produced a Dowell layup, and Dowell closed the half at the buzzer by stealing an in-bounds pass and dropping it in.

That’s the 19-2 part of the run. The next 15 points: Caylie Jones a driving hook off the glass, then a drive through traffic for a layup-and-one. Kassidy Shurman a 3 from the deep left corner. Jacey Wharram a layup off a Becker pass. Then a 3 by Becker and a layup by her sister, Maddy.

That made it 48-26, Morton, at the end of three. Game Over.

In Bisping’s third game back after missing five games with mononucleosis, she made her first 3-pointers since Dec. 20 and led Morton’s scoring with 15 (13 in that second quarter). Caylie Jones had 9, Josi Becker 8, Dowell 7, Shurman 6, Lindsey Dullard 3, and 2 each from Bridget Wood, Maddy Becker, and Wharram.

Speaking of “Windex,” as we were, I thought the Potters did OK. Their statistician insisted, however, that they left the glass near-spotless. The Potters’ chart had them with 20 rebounds, led by Courtney Jones’s 6, to Lincoln-Way Central’s 10.

Oddly, unlike the Lincoln-Way Central game, the Morton-U High contest was close deep into the fourth quarter – and yet I never thought the Potters could lose. Though weary after playing at Metamora the night before and Lincoln-Way Central this morning, the Potters led U High, 33-23, late in the third quarter. The rest of the way, U High could get no nearer than four points – and lost to Morton for the second time in three weeks, the first defeat coming 42-39 in double-overtime at the State Farm Holiday Classic.

Josi Becker led Morton’s scoring against U High with 10. Shurman and Caylie Jones had 8 each, Bisping and Dowell 6 each, Courtney Jones 5, Maddy Becker 3, and Dullard 2.

The two games Saturday, by the way, were the openers of Galesburg’s Martin Luther King tournament which the Potters have won six years in a row, losing only one of 30 games. Monday, they go to Galesburg to play the hosts.

One thing more on Becker’s 400….

An assistant coach, Megan Hasler, asked if I would contribute a thought on the historic occasion. I had no thoughts. But I did have some numbers. I sent her “Bob Becker by the Numbers.” Here it is….

1. That time in Pekin when he said, “We kicked the living crud out of them.”
2. Pairs of pants split while coaching enthusiastically.
3. Games he was T’d up for removing his suit jacket enthusiastically.
7. Victories in a row over Galesburg.
43. Championships in Mid-Illini, Thanksgiving, MLK, regional, sectional, supersectional, state.
57. A narrow victory over East Peoria.
112, give or take a hundred: Times during a game when he shouts, “REBOUND!”
199. Victories I’ve seen.
201. Victories he managed before I arrived.
400. Midnights when Evelyn said, “No, we are not watching one more coaching video.”

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.

1. Morton Lady Potters – (14 wins & 0 losses);

T2. Limestone Rockets – (8 wins & 6 losses);

T2.  Pekin Lady Dragons – (8 wins & 6 losses);

T2.  Dunlap Eagles – (8 wins & 6 losses);

5.  Canton Little Giants – (6 wins & 8 losses);

6.  Metamora Redbirds – (5 wins & 9 losses);

7.  Washington Panthers – (4 wins & 10 losses)

8.   East Peoria Raiders – (3 wins & 11 losses);

(as of Feb. 10th, 2017)