“This is a team that’s not going to quit”

Lady Potters 64, Batavia 29
Lady Potters 59, East St. Louis 55 (OT)

Damned if I know what to say, other than be still my frickin’ heart. Talking about the East St. Louis game. The Potters were down 21 with a quarter to play. That late, nobody wins from 21 down. It’s deadsville.

Twenty-one down, they had not made a field goal in the third quarter. Twenty-one down, they had missed six of their last eight free throws. Twenty-one down, they couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle.

It was 49-28, East St. Louis, and I made a note to myself, “Worst regular season loss ever?”

Then the Potters went and did the damn thing.

In one of their state championship seasons – maybe it was 2017 – the coach, Bob Becker, thought to praise his Lady Potters for their resilience, their refusal to lose, their ever-lovin’ persistence in the belief that doomsday would never arrive.

He said, “You are the toughest little shits in the entire state of Illinois.”

Well, now we have seen the arrival of Tough Little Shits, 2.0.

They began the fourth quarter with three buckets in two minutes – an Izzy Hutchinson rebound, an Addy Engel driving layup, a 3-pointer by the sophomore Julia Laufenberg. Those field goals caused a stirring of life. I even made a note: “Hope?”

Bob Becker saw more than hope. He said, “I looked at the clock, we’re only 14 down with six minutes to play. Plenty of time.”

In girls’ high school basketball, six minutes is not always time enough to score 14 points, let alone score 14 against a team that had pushed you around all day. But Becker said plenty of time, and the sweethearts of TLS 2.0 must have believed him because the game turned in ways only they might have imagined.

Engel came out of a timeout to throw in a 3-pointer. Now the Potters were within single digits, 49-40, 5:21 to play. East St. Louis called two timeouts in a minute, desperate to find a way through the Potters’ full-court pressure – desperate and failing. The pressure pushed East St. Louis to a nervous breakdown of turnovers and the Potters were quick to cash in.

An Ellie VanMeenen layup at 4:10. Two free throws by Hutchinson at 3:10. A Tatym Lamprecht 3 at 1:56. An Engel drive at 1:23. Two more Hutchinson free throws at :45.4 made it 51-all.

When it was over, when she held a tiny plaque that went to the champions of this Thanksgiving Tournament, I asked Lamprecht an unanswerable question: “Was there a moment, a play, when you knew, ‘We got this’?”

Unanswerable? Not on your life. Tatym Lamprecht had the perfect answer.

“When I made that 3, the first one in the fourth quarter,” she said. That one moved Morton within three, 50-47, for the first time in an hour. Then came the Engel layup and Hutchinson’s free throws for the tie.

Another Lamprecht 3 was the killing dagger, her fifth 3 of the game. It came the first time she touched the ball in the overtime. It came after Hutchinson did the scratching, clawing, invaluable dirty work that winners do when it must be done.

Off the center tip to begin the overtime, a tip won by the East St. Louis player, the ball fell among three or four pairs of feet setting off a whirling, diving, falling-onto-the-pile scramble for possession of the kind that is won by the girl who wants the ball the most.

That girl on this night, all this night, always somehow coming up with the ball, was Isabella Hutchinson, who later would say, “We had more heart than they did.”

Her scrambling save set the Potters offense in motion. One pass, maybe two, and the ball moved to Lamprecht outside the arc on the left side.

Just lovely. Ball touched her hands. A microsecond later, gone, in the air, nothing but net. And the Potters led for the first time since late in the first quarter. Now it was 54-51.

Lamprecht added three more free throws and Laufenberg one to send East St. Louis to deadsville.

“This is a team that’s not going to quit,” Becker said. “It’s going to compete, regardless of what’s already happened. Winning is not easy. But the kids, their belief in themselves is getting better and better. We’re growing.”

I would tell you about the Potters first game Saturday, a 64-29 victory over Batavia. But too much happened and it’s too late to keep writing. Here’s the shorthand: Batavia was already worn out by winning an early-morning battle with Richwoods. Immediately after, foregoing rest so it could get to its football team’s state championship game, it had to play Morton. Many things ensued. Batavia was charged with three technical fouls, the coach was ejected, four Batavia fans were ejected from the gym for speaking ill of the referees, and the reserves got to play a lot. In all, it was fun.

Today’s Potters scoring:

In the Batavia game – Lamprecht 20 (including the 1,000th point of her career), Engel 10, Emelia Miller 9, Hutchinson 8, Laufenberg 5, VanMeeneen 4, Magda Lopko 4, Abbey Pollard 2, Anja Ruxlow 2.

In the East St. Louis game –Lamprecht 18, Engel 18, Hutchinson 14, Laufenberg 4, VanMeenen 3, Graci Junis 2.