I swear, Lincoln is quiet.

It’s easy to lose to Lincoln. They’re really good. They’re small, no starter taller than 5-foot-9. But they’re all seniors back from the team that was 37-0 when it lost the Class 3A championship game in March. They’re a pleasure to watch. They have an all-state guard who can beat you by herself. On both ends of the court, they know where the ball is going and why it’s going there. They waste no effort. The five move as one. To explain the inexplicable, that great guard, Kloe Froebe, said it’s simple: “We’ve been playing together since kindergarten. The first six, forever.”

Other teams play as if their hair is on fire.

Other teams practice frenzy.

Lincoln gets quiet.

This quiet . . .

    The fog comes

       on little cat feet

Tonight, because Lincoln never gave Morton a chance, I had time to think of Carl Sandburg’s poem, “Fog.” I mean, hey, Sandburg was a Lincoln biographer, and here was Lincoln High School’s extraordinary basketball team. Reason enough for a sportswriter to work the old poet’s stuff into a story.

Late in the third quarter, quietly, on little cat feet, sprinting to the hoop from the deep right corner, here came Lincoln’s rawboned Becca Heitzig, #4 on your program.

I didn’t see her moving. And Froebe, her back to the basket, could not have seen Heitzig. The difference is, those two had done this thing a hundred times. Froebe knew where Heitzig would be. It was a play called “41.”

“41” calls for Froebe to keep the ball out front. She takes the dribble left, spins to her right, and then . . .

She bounces a pass 20 feet down the right side of the free throw lane where . . .

It settles into Becca Heitzig’s hands for an uncontested layup. (Heitzig seemed to have materialized from vapor.) There were seven seconds left in the third quarter. Sportswriters call that a dagger. It kills. Morton was dead, down 56-43 going into the last quarter.

It’s one thing to lose, and no one likes that, so losing for the third time in seven games this season was no fun for the Potters. Against Lincoln’s full-court zone press and its 2-3 zone, Morton handled the ball poorly. The Potters also seemed a step behind Lincoln’s every move on offense.

They certainly had no answer for Froeboe, whose 33 points were scored so quietly as to go unnoticed. She just seemed to be in the right place all night long. A rebound bucket here, a sneaky layup there, a 3-pointer from the top of the key, a passel of free throws when she’s fouled on yet another drive down the lane.

Against all this Lincolnian quiet and calm, the Potters were made to look frenetic. They created a rogue’s gallery of turnovers, allowing daylight burglary at midcourt, thinking they could get away with cross-court lobs. The ugliest turnover came when Froebe locked her arms around the ball held overhead by a Potter, ripped it away and tossed it downcourt, as if she knew that Becca Heitzig – that Heitzig wraith – would be flying that way for another easy two.

That’s the kind of thing that is a coach’s greatest frustration. The Potters have lost to three teams with state-championship possibilities, Peoria High, Peoria Notre Dame, and Lincoln. In each game, Morton has been within reach of victory deep into the fourth quarter. Good stuff there. But the Potters’ coach, Bob Becker, is unhappy with his team’s mediocre free-throw shooting and its “self-inflicted wounds” of turnovers and defensive lapses.

Still, he can imagine success in the Mid-Illini Conference as soon as his two front-line freshman, Abby VanMeenen and Paige Selke, adapt to competition against big, strong veterans. “We’ve learned in this tournament that we can score,” Becker said. The Potters scored 71, 75, 56, and 50. And he has said, “In another month, we can be very good.”

Stay tuned.

Addy Engel led Morton’s scoring with 14. Izzy Hutchinson had 12, Abby VanMeenen 10, Ellie VanMeenen 8, Paige Selke 4, Anja Ruxlow 2.

(A writerly turnover: The Potters are 4-3 for the season, not the 3-3 suggested in an earlier version of this.)