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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here comes Dullard running free . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such is grit.

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

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