GREENSBORO ó It’s rarely about the start, of course. Always about the finish.
And longevity, the Salisbury girls basketball team taught us Saturday afternoon, can be a difficult test.
“All I can say,” Salisbury’s Shi-Heria Shipp noted with a post-game giggle, “is the past is the past. We won the game that mattered the most. Now we can think about the states.”
They can do that because they won a game that barely broke par, a game played at a knit-one/pearl-two pace, a game that made the Amish look exciting.
A game so bad, it was good. Make that very good.
“That’s all that matters,” said first-year SHS coach Andrew Mitchell. “Points don’t matter. I don’t care if it was a one-point win or a half-a-point win. The result is the same ó we’re going to the state championship game.”
The only numbers that didn’t lie were 26-24. Salisbury had no business beating previously unblemished East Davidson in the Western Regional final. Teams that shoot 16.7 percent from the floor, make only one field goal in the second half and don’t sink a basket in the last 15-and-a-half minutes aren’t customarily rewarded with a shot at the whole shebang.
What’s more, the Hornets did it against a team that seemingly had their number. ED had delivered four straight setbacks to their otherwise magnificent won-lost ledger, including three this season.
“We didn’t care about that,” sophomore Ayanna Holmes trumpeted. “We weren’t gonna let anybody get in our heads.”
If not the Golden Eagles, then certainly playing for a trip to Chapel Hill was a potential distraction. After all, this round had become Salisbury’s Bermuda Triangle ó a place where victories disappear and are never heard from again.
So how, exactly, did the Hornets convert all the non-believers who gathered to administer last rites at Fleming Gym?
“Is that a trick question?” Mitchell responded in the media room, moments after collecting a showcase worth of hardware.
It was that perplexing. Losing coach Terry Allmon, who looked like a man watching his prized yacht sink in the closing moments, provided a telling clue.
“You can credit Salisbury,” he said outside the despondent East locker room. “That’s the best I’ve seen them play in a long time.”
Huh?
“It’s more than just shooting,” he continued. “The way they played defense and rebounded, that’s the best.”
Ah, defense, the brick and mortar of any championship. Salisbury’s assortment of mesmerizing zones and sneaker-to-sneaker, man-to-mans forced East into a 9-for-43 shooting debacle. Senior Anna Freeman, the six-foot glass-eater who snagged 14 rebounds for the Eagles, shot an un-Anna-like 2-for-14 from the field ó and that proved significant.
“Well, they doubled her and threw a lot more arms and legs at her than they normally do,” said Allmon. “And we had a lot of balls that went in and came out. That’s just the way it went today. Or didn’t go.”
Kindly excuse Allmon if he felt like he’d just spent 32 minutes staring in the mirror. What Salisbury served the defending 2A state champs was a plate of their own pot roast. Let Mitchell explain:
“We took a page from the best team in the state,” he said. “What East did to us the other three times was make us work and work and work on defense. Then they’d lull us to sleep and sneak in for a back-door layup.
“So we tried to do what they did to us,” Mitchell added. “We pulled the ball out and held it for as long as we could. We knew if we didn’t win time-of-possession, they would.”
Beware the ideas of March. This one was a dandy, a slowdown of Princeton proportion that sent the Eagles home with their egos tripped and placed the 28-3 Hornets a victory short of the title.
“Slowing it down, that was something new for all of us,” said guard Bubbles Phifer. “We wanted to make them come to us and just see what we could get out of it.”
Now they’ve got a chance to bring home first prize, something Mitchell impelled in the Hornets by playing an inspirational hymm for them shortly before boarding the team bus yesterday morning.
“Something about, ‘Now is our time to shine,’ ” Phifer said. “He kept saying it and it made us believe in ourselves. Those words stayed in our heads.”