An hour before, Kassidy Shurman twirled the edges of her Rubik’s Cube. The mystifying puzzle had become a thing for her basketball team. “Maybe eight of us do it,” she said. She sat on the Morton High School Lady Potters bench, waiting to suit up in the locker room. It would be the season’s 33rd game, the 141st for Shurman’s senior class, three times running the state champions, looking for a fourth straight.

“How long does it take you to solve it?” I asked, knowing the answer would shame me, for my encounters with Erno Rubik’s invention mostly ended with the thing flying across the room, followed by words such as #$%@&#!

“I can do it under two minutes,” Shurman said. Then, smiling, “My goal is under one minute.”

Two weeks ago, Shurman said she’d never had so much fun on a basketball team. They were Rubik’s Cube nerds, twirling the thing on the bench even in the hour before Thursday night’s sectional championship game. Have you heard of Nerf Guns? Me, neither. But the Potters also turned those toys into team-bonding devices. Best of all, they had won 31 games this season, most of them laughers built on sustained excellence, and if a guy were to write a book about these girls, he had a title: “Laughing All the Way.”

From the seventh grade on – they won a state championship there, too – Shurman moved with teammates Josi Becker and Caylie Jones to achievements unheard of in Illinois girls basketball. In six years of competition, those three played on teams that had won 183 games and lost 10. How good is that? The answer is in another question. If life throws you 193 puzzles, how many of us are good enough to solve 183 of them?

Four minutes into the game, Shurman, a 5-foot-3 shooter, made a 3-pointer from the top of the key to give Morton a 3-2 lead over Peoria Richwoods. There came a great roar from the standing-room-only crowd at Dunlap High, maybe 2,500 people there to see Morton, ranked No. 1 in the state, against Richwoods, No. 2, both teams with 31-1 records, both convinced that the winner would go on to become state champions. Shurman’s shot set off a chant in the Morton student section, “I believe that we will win, I believe that we will win.”

Too early, kids, too early.

Forty-five seconds later, Richwoods scored on an offensive rebound. That bucket was a signal of the storm to come. Of Richwoods’ 19 field goals this night, 16 came at the rim or a step away. The Peorians were the bigger, stronger, faster, and more aggressive team. Defensively, their 2-3 zone’s outside people pushed Morton’s offense so far behind the 3-point arc that the Potters seldom earned even a decent look. Inside, Richwoods’ 6-foot-1 Camryn Taylor emphatically swatted away at least three layups and all night dared anyone to drive into the paint.

Using the same zone defense, Richwoods had beaten Morton in the season’s fourth game, 53-45. This time, instead of finding a solution to that puzzle, the Potters were confused. At the end of the first quarter, his team down 11-3 and having put up only four shots, the Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, looked at his players on the bench and shouted, “WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?”

Momentarily, the Potters rallied. They gained a tie at 13 with 2:57 left in the half.

But that was it. In the 11 minutes of play, Richwoods scored the game’s next 22 points. In short, Richwoods did to Morton what Morton had done to so many teams this season. It went on an extended run of dominance at both ends. Richwoods led at halftime, 20-13, and crushed the Potters in the third quarter.

As helpless as Morton’s offense had been in the first quarter – Shurman’s 3 was the only field goal – the Potters disappeared in the third. For the first time all season, they came undone on offense. A scribble in my notebook: “Can’t make silly turnovers against R’woods.” They did not score in the quarter. If that has happened in my eight years watching Becker’s teams, I don’t remember it. At the end of three, Richwoods led, 33-13. Game over.

For Richwoods’ coach, Todd Hursey, the victory was sweet for many reasons. “This team is on a mission to win the program’s 1,000th game,” he said. “We’re two away now.” He was thrilled, too, that the victory came against Morton. “Bob’s teams have set the bar, not only in the last three years winning the state, but for a decade.” Hursey, who has four starters returning next season, also said, “Now maybe it’s our turn.”

Bob Becker said the only thing he could say: “They took us out of everything we tried to do. . . . They guarded the heck out of us. . . . They got us rattled a little bit. … We got beat by a better team. … We ran into a buzzsaw.”

In the game’s last minute, Becker sent in substitutes for his three seniors, Jones, Shurman, and his daughter, Josi. As each came to the bench, they stopped for a long, quiet hug with the coach. Later, coming from the locker room, tears in her eyes, Josi Becker said, “We just didn’t execute our offense.” I asked how it felt, the four years over. “It sucks,” she said.

I asked Kassidy Shurman what happened in the game. ”I have no idea,” she said. “They were just the better team tonight. They played phenomenal.” Now, the end, four years done? “It sucks,” she said, and she wept, and she said, “I’ve never felt like this. This isn’t anything I’ve ever felt. This sucks.”

Surprising myself, for I have been at this sportswriting thing a long time without ever doing such a thing, I hugged the little watch-charm guard that I’ve seen running hellbent-for-leather since she teamed up with Jones and Becker to win in the seventh grade. And I told Kassidy what a lot of us would say to every one of the Potters, “Thanks for giving all of us more than we ever gave you.”