Sometimes, when the shots aren’t falling and the bounces aren’t going your way, you just have to dig deep.
Wednesday afternoon, that’s exactly what the Greely High girls’ basketball team did. The top-seeded Rangers are seldom tested, their talent and tempo often overwhelming their opponents. But here they were facing elimination, heading into overtime in the Class A South semifinals against rival Gray-New Gloucester at the Portland Expo.
Greely had lost a 14-point lead, and was held to just three points in the fourth quarter. With the scored tied, Gray-New Gloucester had the ball for the final 33.8 seconds of regulation. A basket could have ended the Rangers’ two-year reign as Class A state champions. Instead, Greely’s defense held in the final seconds, and then the Rangers relied on stars Brooke Obar and Camille Clement in overtime to beat the Patriots, 54-49.
“We came into this game knowing we did not want this to be our last game,” said Obar, a senior guard who scored five of her 16 points in overtime, including the go-ahead 3-pointer with 1:44 left.
“Especially me, I didn’t want this to be my last game. And so, toward the home stretch, the five starters got together and said, ‘This is not the end of our season.’ And our intensity picked up, on the court and on the bench.”
And now Greely (19-1) will play in its sixth consecutive regional championship game, at 6:30 p.m. Friday against third-seeded Marshwood at Cross Insurance Arena. The Hawks are in a regional final for the first time since 1995, when they won the Class B title.
Marshwood advanced earlier in the afternoon with a 42-24 win over Falmouth, pulling away from the younger Yachtsmen in the fourth quarter. Senior guard Angelina Bisson hit three consecutive 3-pointers in the fourth to help extend a five-point lead to 17.
“They’re very much like (Gray-New Gloucester),” Greely Coach Todd Flaherty said of Marshwood. “They’re long, good defensively. They push the pace maybe a little more than Gray. They’re very athletic and they’re competitive.”
Greely and Marshwood didn’t play in the regular season, but Hawks Coach Steve Freeman, watching the second game, was impressed.
“They have so many weapons,” he said of Greely. “You’ve got to hope somebody is not hitting her shots, and when they do miss, you’ve got to clean up the boards. And you’ve got to take care of the ball.”
Since losing to Kennebunk, 49-45, on Jan. 14, Greely has won eight games in a row, the average margin of victory 21 points. But the Rangers were tested earlier in the season, with one-point wins over Class AA powers South Portland and Oxford Hills.
“We scraped out some tough games this year, and I thought that would help us in the playoffs,” said Flaherty. “And it certainly didn’t hurt.”
Clement, who scored 14 points, said the Rangers knew how to handle adversity, even after Gray-New Gloucester’s Abbey Michaud tied the game at 47 with a 3-pointer with 3:43 remaining.
“Everything that came out of our mouth at that point was positive,” she said. “And we were hyping each other up. I know Brooke was really good pulling everyone in saying, ‘Let’s go, we got this.’
“That was very encouraging and made us believe even more.”
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