50 Years in the Making

I have many great memories from my high school career that will last with me for the rest of my life, but none stand out more than making it to state in basketball for the first time in our school's history my junior year.  In the 50 year history of Turkey Valley, no basketball team, boys or girls has ever made it to state.  The farthest a team has gone into district competition is the sub-state final, which three teams managed to do.  Our run to state that year was magical as we got hot at the right time.  Before district play began, we had won eleven straight games, but our last two games didn't go so well as we won a very low scoring game and then lost our last game before heading into districts.  Even though we weren't playing the greatest our spirits were still high because we knew we had a chance to make something magical happen.  We won our first district game by a large margin as well as our second game.  In the district final we played MFL who we had beaten twice during the regular season, but going into halftime we trailed them by ten points and thought that this might be the end of our run.  We were wrong as we came out of the half shooting lights out from the field and by the end of the third period we were only down by two.  The fourth quarter was ours to have and I made two straight three pointers to give our team the lead for good as we ended up winning by ten.  We were moving on to the substate final to play Dyersville-Beckman who many believed would win outside of our school.  The game went back and forth the whole way with no lead getting bigger than five points.  With two minutes left though, we were trailing by five pionts, but we scored buckets on back to back possessions to get within one and held them.  So with 15 seconds left we had the ball and one of our seniors make the biggest shot in Turkey Valley history to put us ahead by one with 6 seconds left.  But we still had to make a stop as Dyersville got the ball back with plenty of time, but they dribbled the ball off of their foot with .9 on the clock, so all we had to do was get the ball inbounds. We did but we got fouled with .2 left so we just had to make one free throw to end it.  We made one and purposely missed the second, and when the buzzer sounded we all stormed the court in mass celebration as we were going to state for the first time in school history.  We made it 50 years in the making and were heading to Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines with a sea of red.  I will never forget the last few moments of the substate final game as I can easily picture everything that went on and how magical it was celebrating, it was the best experience of my life so far.