“We’re searching”

Canton 47

Lady Potters 38

A long time ago, I took a football coaching class at Illinois Wesleyan. For a term paper I designed the offense of my dreams. It would be all passes. I believed that only knuckle-dragging Neanderthals bought into three yards and a cloud of dust. We would fill the sky with pigskin. My quarterback would be a combination of Bart Starr and Johnny Unitas. (Kids, look ‘em up.)

Later, I even liked those college basketball teams that did nothing but shoot 3’s. See the rim, fling the thing. Get a rebound, do it again. Defense? Who needs defense? Just give me the ball back, we’ll shoot it again. Run five subs in at once, let ‘em run helter-skelter for 90 seconds, bring in five new ones. Yeah, we might lose 143-113, but if enough of our running prayers fall in, we might win 160-98.

These are the thoughts, of course, of a man given to delusions of offense after seeing the Potters score one point in tonight’s second quarter as they fell behind at halftime, 21-9, and never got it into single-digits until the last three seconds.

They’re also the thoughts of a man who just drove back from Canton in the dark of night on that gawdawful Route 24 past swamps, stinkin’ chemical plants, and ghostly concrete towers that are probably home to creepy crawlies extinct in civilized parts of the world.

Yeah, I’m no good tonight. Back in Morton, I stopped at McDonald’s. It was 9:03 p.m. At 9:07 I said, “Deluxe crispy chicken sandwich, Diet Coke.” A voice said, “$7.27 at the second window.” At 9:11, I was the fifth car in line. At 9:17, I had not moved an inch. At 9:18, I put it in reverse, backed up a foot, pulled around the line of cars, and left for I-74 and home. Let the second window figure out what happened to the $7.27 guy.

Yeah, not in a good mood.

Still ticked about that flagrant-foul call on Izzy Hutchinson. It was not a big play in the game. But the Potters still had a hint of hope. They were 14 down when Izzy’s pestiferous defense caused a jump ball near midcourt with three minutes to play. Wrestling for possession, the Canton girl spun loose from Izzy’s grip and fell down, at which point an incompetent in a striped shirt blew a whistle.

“I let go of her,” Izzy said, meaning the Canton spinning girl, “because I thought I might get a foul.”

When she looked at the referee, she saw he had his arms crossed in an X above his head, the signal for a flagrant foul.

Now, I have seen flagrant fouls. They’re flagrant, as in intentionally delivered in a way that might cause injury. This was not that. This was a tug of war for possession that ended with the weaker girl losing her balance.

The call had nothing to do with who won or lost. It just moved Canton to 16 up with 3:09 left.

But still. When you’ve lost five or your last six games, as the Potters have, it’s never a morale boost to be on the wrong end of a referee’s two-point mistake in the last three minutes of a game you might still have a chance to win. In those last three minutes, running loose, the Potters outscored Canton 14-7.

“I feel for our kids, they’re reeling,” the Morton coach, Bob Becker, said. “We’re trying, we’re searching. We’re having to find answers. Right now it’s obviously a struggle.”

Morton is now 11-9 for the season, 4-4 in the Mid-Illini. Canton is 11-9 and 3-4.

Morton’s scoring tonight: Hutchinson 17 (“Izzy played her heart out,” Becker said.) Tatym Lamprecht 11, Addy Engel 4, Ellie VanMeenen 3, Abbey Pollard 3