If I knew how I got to Herscher, I’d tell you. Google Maps showed me a way. It looked to be a hundred miles. Get off I-55 at Odell, go east to Campus, north to Herscher. Yeah, right. You ever been east of Odell? It’s siloes and snowmobiles stuck in the ditch. Ever seen the Village of Campus, population 100? Me, neither. Somehow we wound up on the World’s Oldest Semi-Paved Highway. At last we ker-bumpity’d into Herscher, a nice, little town where the Morton Lady Potters began attacking another state championship.

I say “attacking” in a bow to a Potters’ all-time great, the little guard Chandler Ryan, who insisted that “defending” a championship was a passive statement. “We’re attacking the championship,” she said. That they did, winning not only a second in Ryan’s time but adding a third straight last season. Now they’re on the attack again.

How the Potters were assigned to the Herscher regional, I have no idea. Herscher is not in Morton’s region unless your idea of region includes anyplace where corn and beans can be grown. But I’m not here to complain about geographic puzzlements. (Truth is, we arrived so early we had time to discover the Herscher Family Restaurant and enjoy a fine meal.) I am here to report on the Potters’ attack.

Morton 71, Pontiac 18.

It was 25-2 after a quarter.

Thursday night the Potters will play for the regional championship and the right to advance to sectional play in Dunlap.

Morton is now 29-1 for the season. It’s on a 26-game winning streak. In the last three seasons and tonight’s regional game, the Potters have won 22 straight win-or-go-home games in state tournament play. It needs to win six more in the next three weeks to win the Class 3A championship a fourth time. No girls team has ever done that.

So why not the Potters and why not now?

They’re skilled basketball players playing free and easy. They’re scoring on fast breaks. They’re scoring out of sets. They’re throwing in 3’s. They’re turning steals and turnovers into transition runaways. Out a merciless trapping press and in man-to-man, they’re playing defense as if giving up one field goal is an affront to their sensibilities. They’ve now built a reputation that precedes them – as we’ll see in tonight’s quotes from the Pontiac coach – and every night they polish that reputation to a shining, shimmering glow.

After the game, Pontiac’s Dan Gschwendtner used CoachSpeak to praise the Potters and their coach, Bob Becker.

“They just all get after it,” he said, emphasis on the “after it.”

Teams getting after it are teams that attack.

“They do the hardest thing that any coach has to do. Everybody buys in.”

Players buying-in are players who create teams with one mind, everyone on fire with a shared ambition.

“Everyone makes the extra pass,” the Pontiac coach said. “Everyone goes after the loose ball.” Then he said, “I don’t know how Bob does it, but every one of them buys in.”

So I asked Becker, “How do you do it?”

The coach, now in his 19th season, gave an answer 19 years in the making.

“All the great teams and players of the past have built a program that now we call ‘The Potter Way,’” he said. “They play hard and they play unselfishly and they play with the goal of ‘consistent excellence.’ It’s never about individuals. It’s always about team. Every huddle, every meeting, we end with ‘TEAM.’”

That TEAM is on a roll. Tonight, in 2 ½ minutes, it made its first three shots, all 3-pointers, two by Josi Becker, one by Lindsey Dullard, for a 9-0 lead. After Pontiac somehow scored, the Potters went on a 16-0 run to end the quarter.

My favorite moments in that run came late, both on defense. Stretching high out of a trap, Tenley Dowell simply took the ball out of a bewildered Pontiac player’s hands and went the other way for a layup and free throw. In the last minute, Kassidy Shurman bumped up against a dribbler long enough to pick her pocket and toss the ball to Dowell at the other end. Another layup.

The TEAM played so well that Bob Becker said, “Our kids are so confident now, I don’t think there’ll be a moment too big for us.”

Josi Becker made 4 3’s tonight and led Morton’s scoring with 16. Dullard and Dowell each had 13. Maddy Becker scored 7. Courtney Jones, Peyton Dearing, and Caylie Jones had 4 apiece. Kathryn Reiman and Claire Kraft had 3 each, and Addi Cox and Bridget Wood 2 each.

As best this intrepid reporter could find, the Potters had only one problem tonight. Assistant coach Megan Hasler made it her duty to find a solution. A half hour after the game, she had an iPhone in hand. When returning from distant lands, the Potters have a tradition of stopping the team bus at the first McDonald’s along the way. McDonald’s has franchises in Moscow, Beijing, and the seventh ring of Saturn. But Herscher, Illinois? Get real.

“The nearest Mac’s,” Hasler reported, “is in Kankakee.”

“But,” I said, “that’s in the wrong direction, isn’t it?”

“I have no idea,” Hasler said.

I dunno if the Potters ever found their quarter-pounders. But on my long ride home, I passed a McDonald’s in Pontiac right before I made a wrong turn into a street marked with a sign saying DEAD END. Sigh.