“Wow!” a spectator brought to her feet at Friday’s Pierson-Southold county Class C championship game here said as the Settlers’ Nick Grathwohl with six seconds to go pulled up and drained an N.B.A. 3-pointer that torpedoed the stunned Whalers 62-60.
“Wow!”
In the frenzied aftermath, which Southold’s players and fans greeted with glee and which left Pierson’s players and fans with their mouths agape, Grathwohl, who had been shadowed man-for-man throughout the night, he being Southold’s chief scoring threat, said when asked what he was thinking when he let it go, “Please . . . please, God, please. . . .”
There were five seconds remaining when Pierson inbounded, the ball going to its stellar senior guard, Henry Brooks, who, on the run, put up a wing-and-
a-prayer heave in the forecourt that bounced off the backboard, then the rim. Thus came to an end Pierson’s singular season, one in which Will Fujita’s team went 12-0 in League VIII play, one in which it had bested 8-4 Southold 60-43 and 76-48.
It is, as they say, hard to win three in a row.
Pierson was winning, and winning by quite a bit, by 15 points with five minutes left to play, but then Wilson Bennett, a strong inside player who fueled, with 14 points, a third-quarter Whaler resurgence that seemingly had put the game away, fouled out, and then, 15 seconds later, Nick Egbert, who had spent most of the night guarding Grathwohl, did too.
When Egbert was tagged with his fifth personal, with 3:10 on the clock, Pierson was up by 12. A minute later, the Settlers having clamped on an unsettling press, the margin was 8. Then, with 52 seconds remaining, it was 5, Peter Schaefer, who fouled out on the play, having reached in as Grathwohl made as if to put one up from just inside the midcourt line. Grathwohl was to make two of those three free throws, narrowing the margin to 5.
Later, Southold’s bearded senior guard, who was to finish with 30 points — tying a career high — said the key had been Bennett’s withdrawal to the bench as the result of a charge with 3:25 to go. He had told his teammates then, said Grathwohl, that it was time to bring the hammer down.
One of Pierson’s subs, Richard Rodriguez, went to the line to shoot
two with 53.6 left, but missed both. Southold’s Nick Carr rebounded the second miss, after which, with :39 remaining, Nick Eckhardt hit a huge 3 from the left corner for 57-55, prompting a Pierson timeout.
Brooks, subsequently fouled by Nick DeNicola on the inbounds play, made one of two from the line — the first rolling slowly around the rim before dropping off — for 58-55. But Grathwohl came right back, drawing a foul as he tried to bank one in from the baseline.
He made both free throws — it was a 1-point game with 24.1 seconds left.
Brooks again was fouled, but again missed the first and made the second, for a 59-57 Whaler lead, after which Pierson called another timeout. When play resumed, the inbounded ball made its way from DeNicola to Cole Brigham to Grathwohl, who went right to the hoop, banking in a layup that tied the game at 59-59 with 13.5 seconds to go.
Brooks was fouled yet again, and again missed the first and made the second to wrest back the lead at 60-59. Thirteen seconds remained; the rest you know.
Reached over the weekend, Fujita said, when questioned, “If character is defined by how you handle adversity we can hold our heads high.”
There were probably things he could have done to counter the 17-point swing, he said, in answer to a question, but having three starters foul out in the final moments had obviously hurt.
Brooks, who finished with 24 points (Bennett had 20), had, he agreed, played a great game. He couldn’t say enough, he said, about his seniors, namely Brooks, Schaefer, Egbert, Harry Cowen, and Jessup Kunzeman.
“They’re respectful, they worked very hard . . . they’re good kids,” said Fujita, who added, “I hope that I’ll be a part of all their lives — they’ve definitely affected mine.”
Meanwhile, he was confident given the very, very high youth numbers and the community’s extremely supportive parents and coaches that Sag Harbor would be back.
“We’re raising the bar as high as possible,” the coach said in signing off.