Though Amityville went into the county boys basketball playoffs with an 8-6 record, while East Hampton, which played host to Thursday's Class A quarterfinal matchup, finished at 13-2 in league play, it was immediately evident that the seventh-seeded Warriors and the second-seeded Bonackers were evenly matched.
Playing before a packed house after Dakota Quackenbush and Nicholas Cooper had sung an affecting a cappella version of the national anthem, the teams battled toe-to-toe from beginning to end.
A 3-pointer by Bonac's Jack Dickinson, who had a number of assists that night, knotted the score at 40-40 with a little more than five minutes to play, but thereafter the visitors were to get the best of it, draining 3s of their own, winning fierce struggles for loose balls, and countering East Hampton attacks.
No sooner had Dickinson hit the aforementioned 3 than Tyler Hinton, an Amityville senior guard who reportedly had not been a long-distance threat in the regular season, replied with a 3 of his own, wresting the lead back for the visitors, who thereafter were not to relinquish it, however hard East Hampton tried to tilt things its way.
Another 3-pointer by Hinton and one about a minute later by Seville Williams, a junior guard, put the Warriors up 51-44 with two and a half minutes to play. A subsequent basket by Dickinson following a timeout narrowed the lead to 5 points, after which Hinton's 3-point try from the right corner bounced off the rim, and following another battle for the ball, the refs, having conferred, ruled in East Hampton's favor.
At the other end of the court Finn Byrnes went for the hoop, but Christian Smiley, a 6-foot-4-inch junior forward, Amityville's tallest player, blocked his shot. A minute and a half remained. Following some to and fro, Luke Reese, East Hampton's stellar senior point guard, stole the ball from Williams at midcourt and was headed toward the basket when Williams stole it back, drawing a foul from Reese in doing so. Amityville inbounded, and after the ball had been worked around, Williams drove the baseline for a basket that put the visitors up 53-46 with 1:08 on the clock.
Another basket by Byrnes narrowed the lead to 5 again, but moments later he was sent to the bench with his fifth foul, having impeded Smiley, who made both free throws for a 7-point Amityville lead with 33 seconds left. Liam Fowkes, a junior guard, then missed a 3-point attempt, prompting Dickinson to foul Justin Thornton, a senior forward, who missed the front end of the one-and-one, after which Reese stopped and popped and drained a 3 that brought the home team to within 4. But there were only 10 seconds to go.
Following an East Hampton timeout, Williams, who had broken away, iced the 6-point win.
"We had a chance to take the lead with about five minutes to go," East Hampton's coach, Dan White, said later. "Finn intercepted a pass, but he bobbled it in transition, and they took a shot, Luke got the rebound, but it was ripped out of his hands, and they hit a 3. . . . You almost have to tip your hat to him [Hinton] because he'd only made seven 3s all year."
White said he thought his players "played great defensively, but at times we didn't take care of the ball, we were too amped up. That was the best Amityville shot this season, they had seven 3s. . . . But, hey, to see the gym packed as it was that night was great. That hasn't happened since Billy McKee's team played Bayport in 2016. I want people to know how grateful I am that the community came out."
Moreover, White said, "This season has been the most fun I've had coaching a team in my 13 years of doing it. Jack, Luke, Finn, Nick [Cordone], and Jesse [Cohen], my seniors, are all great kids. They all do well in school and in practices, and I'm sure they will continue to do well. I've never had three athletes on a team who have gone on to play in college."
Reese is to play basketball at either Baruch College or Western New England University, Dickinson is to play baseball at Niagara University, and Byrnes is to play football at Stony Brook University.
As for the scoring that night, Amityville's Williams finished with 19 points, Hinton with 13, and Smiley with 11. Reese led East Hampton with 13 points, followed by Byrnes with 12, Dickinson with 11, and Fowkes with 10.
Amityville will play in a Class A semifinal-round game at Mount Sinai High School on Tuesday. The county Class A championship game is to be played Saturday at Stony Brook University at 5 p.m.
Amityville's coach, Jack Agostino, said after the showdown that his team, which entered February at 6-6 in league competition, had been in playoff mode for a while. "We had to win our last three games just to get into the playoffs," he said.