Kyle Rockwell, celebrating Senior Night with dad Sheldon, played the best game of his career Thursday as Coupeville shocked first-place Klahowya. (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)
They could not lose. They would not lose.
Weathering a torrid fourth-quarter run by their first-place foes, and the loss of a key starter mid-game to injury, the Coupeville High School boys basketball players reached down deep Thursday, finding a final bit of magic to close out their home careers.
Playing for much of the game with essentially five players, all seniors, the Wolves toppled visiting Klahowya 59-54 for an emotion-packed victory which will be remembered for some time to come.
The win lifts Coupeville to 4-4 in Olympic League play, 6-13 overall, with a road game Saturday at win-less Chimacum all that’s left on the schedule.
Klahowya slips to 6-2 and its game Saturday against Port Townsend, also 6-2, will be a battle royal for the league crown.
With only two playoff spots available, Coupeville will miss the postseason, so the Wolves had to make their memories now.
And did they ever.
Playing on Senior Night, the six-pack of Hunter Downes, Ethan Spark, Cameron Toomey-Stout, Joey Lippo, Hunter Smith and Kyle Rockwell attacked with a wild abandon.
Lippo was lost to a hyper-extended knee two minutes into the second quarter, but his teammates rallied in his absence, closing the half on an 11-2 run.
The lanky defensive ace returned to the bench in the second half, limping and grimacing, yet trying to talk his coaches into putting him back on the floor.
Instead, they chose the prudent route, leaving Lippo strapped to his seat and operating as a vocal, impassioned fan for his classmates.
Other than brief cameos for junior Dane Lucero and sophomore Mason Grove, the other five seniors never left the floor, and all five made huge plays down the stretch.
A tightly-contested game started to turn into a pro-Coupeville blowout early in the fourth quarter, then the game took a sickening lurch before things righted themselves again.
With Smith raining down buckets from every direction on his way to a career-high 35, including a three-ball that caressed the net as it sank through in perfect unison with the third-quarter buzzer, CHS was on fire.
When Toomey-Stout poked a ball free, then hit the afterburners to beat two Eagles to the ensuing loose ball and slap it home for a breakaway bucket, the Wolves were up 51-39.
The stands were rocking, the Wolf bench was pounding the floor and CHS coach Brad Sherman had a huge smile on his face.
And then Klahowya reminded everyone how it landed in first place in the beginning.
Using a 12-2 run, with the final exclamation point a “no way that’s going in and … CRUD, it just did” three-point bomb, the Eagles pulled all the way back to 53-51 with 30 ticks on the game clock.
Coupeville could have cracked. It probably should have cracked.
But it didn’t.
Smith knocked down a free throw to stretch the lead to three, and, when he shocked the world by missing attempt #2, Rockwell made the single most memorable play of his sporting life.
The Wolf big man, an urban legend who the fans adore, came roaring up the lane, out-muscled three Klahowya players, yanked the rebound to his chest, then exploded up and banked home the put-back as he got savagely beat around the head and arms.
As Rockwell headed to the line to try and make it a three-point play the hard way, you could cue the bedlam and the celebration.
Except there was still 28.4 agonizing seconds on the clock and we weren’t done quite yet.
Rockwell’s charity shot rimmed out, popped airborne and … Smith came flying in from the right side to return the favor to his teammate, yanking down the rebound and hugging the ball to his chest.
Two more Smith free throws, another Klahowya three-ball, then a Spark free throw and the margin was finally too large and the time left on the clock too little for even the most die-hard of Eagle fans to still be dreaming of a win.
Just to drive home the point, Toomey-Stout jumped 72 feet in the air (give or take a few inches) to pick off Klahowya’s final in-bounds pass.
In the scrum, a Klahowya player unloaded a kick into Rockwell’s shins, then, realizing it was probably better not to tick off the otherwise gentle giant, started profusely apologizing for his inadvertent field goal attempt.
Not that it mattered all that much, as Rockwell, celebrating an epic end to his final home game, was all smiles and in a forgiving mood at the moment.
Before things got crazy in the late going, the game was an intense back-and-forth affair.
The first quarter saw three ties and an incredible display of body control in mid-air from Smith.
Sprinting the length of the floor as the clock ran down, he pulled in a long outlet pass, hopped towards the basket, split two defenders, then held in the air as both Eagles returned to the surly bonds of Earth beneath him.
As they did, Smith slapped home the layup from an impossible angle, absorbed a shot to the arms from a defender, then calmly went to the line and sank a free throw to cap the play.
All while staying as calm and composed as an old man sitting on a porch drinking a cup of tea and talking about the alfalfa crop.
Down 14-12 at the first break, Coupeville was trailing 18-14 when Lippo crashed to the court and stayed down.
While he was eventually able to limp off the floor and head to the locker room, with a lot of assistance, the play could have sucked all the air out of the joint.
Instead, it lit a fuse under the remaining seniors, as they seized the lead and never looked back.
Spark knocked down back-to-back three-balls, with the first one coming after he pulled off a fake which caused his defender to lose all sense of balance and crash, butt-first, to the ground.
A breakaway bucket for Toomey-Stout, in full “Camtastic”-mode, and a jumper from Smith, set up by another big board from Rockwell, sent CHS to the halftime break up 25-21.
The third quarter started as a battle of treys, as the teams combined to net five straight three-balls to open things, then turned into a display of sheer Wolf grit.
Downes and Rockwell abused the Eagles on the boards, and, even when a play broke down, Coupeville found a way to make it work.
Spark lost the handle on the ball near his bench, but pulled off a ballet move more typically shown by Lippo, a seasoned veteran of the dance stage.
Flicking the ball over his shoulder a moment before he crashed out of bounds, Spark not only saved the ball but directed it right onto the fingertips of Smith, who promptly bashed home a runner off the glass.
With every one of the six seniors selling out on seemingly every play, Sherman came away with a rosy glow of pride in his cheeks.
“This is a really special group of seniors,” he said. “I am really happy they got to go out on their home court this way. Very, very proud of how they played and how they finished.
“These guys have worked so hard, and they deserved this. They really did.”
Smith’s 35 was spread out, with 10 in the first, three in the second, another 10 in the third and 12 in the crucible of the fourth quarter.
With that display of offensive fire power, he runs his scoring total to 830 points, passing Corey Cross (811) for 12th place on the Wolf boys career scoring chart.
Toomey-Stout knocked down nine in support, while Spark (7), Rockwell (6) and Lippo (2) also scored.
And, while points get a lot of the glory, it was Coupeville’s defense which ably shared the spotlight.
“We needed to control the boards and we did,” Sherman said. “We really got them out of their rhythm and had hands in the passing lanes on almost every play.
“Kyle was huge for us and Hunter (Downes) is just a special athlete with the way he fights for every ball.
“I’m really, really happy for all of them!”
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