The ending came on like an old standard, like “Stardust” requested by that portly gentleman and his wife at the back table in honor of their 30th wedding anniversary. It was slipped onto the turntable, the needle came down, and sure, the old tune played as well as it ever had. Joe Porcello sank two foul shots with nine seconds left and Norwood was a 65-64 winner over Don Bosco in the Tech tournament yesterday in the Garden. The basic final ingredients were the same as they’ve always been: time, the Garden, and a teenage basketball player’s thoughts. How many – times had Joe Porcello mentally taken those foul shots, with the old Norwood Mustangs in trouble? How many times had he stood on some foul line in Norwood and imagined he was in the Garden and the world, for a moment, was being bounced twice and thrown at the same basket John Havlicek uses? A million? Maybe.
A thousand? Probably more like it Finally, the scene was there for real yesterday, Don Bosco of course called time out to give Joe Porcello time to think about it all some more . . . “That’s what I was thinking, about all the times I’d practiced this shot,” the smallish guard said. “Yeh, that’s what I was thinking during the time out and when I was out there, standing at the line, waiting for them to come back on the court and hearing all the noise.
“But then, I just looked at the rim and forgot everything. …” Porcello’s foul shots on a one-and-one situation actually gave Norwood a three-point lead, 63-60, and put the game out of reach. They were the final appropriate shove to the nagging, scrambling losers, in a game that was one of those examples you’d like to show your exchange-student friend when he asks what high school basketball tournaments are all about. From the beginning, when Norwood coach Ken Nolet looked at a tall member of the opposition named Billy Collins and said, “I think he might be a little better than we had expected,” until the end, when Collins finished with 43 points, one sky of the Class B Tech record, the game was a classic.
It started with both teams nervous, aware of the strange, 15,000-seat surroundings and a little awed by it all. There were missed shots, forced passes, nervous mistakes. ‘ Norwood recovered first. It kept the ball from the 6-foot-7 Collins, moved a little on offense and by half time, was ahead, 30-21, and seemed ready to think about the Class B quarterfinals. Then, of course, there was a full-court press.
Then of course, there were some fouls. Chris Macauley, who had been playing Collins, fouled out before the third period was half over, the Bosco press started to work, and suddenly it was a ballgame. . Collins got the ball again and again and again underneath (he wound up hitting 14 of 15 field goal attempts) and when the game had only three minutes remaining, you looked up on the clock and sure enough, Don Bosco was leading, 57-54. “We tried to front him (Collins), we tried to play in back of him, we tried to do everything against him,” Nolet said, “but nothing seemed to work very well, once we lost Macaulay.” The lead came back to Norwood, then went back to Bosco, then came back to Norwood and then Bosco wound up with the ball, behind By a point, with 16 seconds left.
There was a terrible pass to no one in the backcourt (“The kid said he was afraid he was double-dribbling or something,” losing coach John Cochrane said), Norwood got the ball back with 11 seconds and then Porcello was fouled. The end. “How can you fault kids who worked like that?” (Cochrane asked as his losers showered. The question, of course, was rhetorical. How can you ever find fault with a standard?.
By Leigh Montville, Globe Staff