The Bonac boys basketball season ended in spectacular fashion: a 61-57 double-overtime loss at Northport High School that had everything you could ask for in a game — tension, talent, and even two nosebleeds.
Nick Jarboe, East Hampton’s athletic trainer, had his work cut out for him, stuffing cotton up nostrils, namely Tyler Persan’s (he was hit in the face) and Jackson Carney’s (he was so hyped up his nose might not have been able to take all of the excitement).
“They’re very physical, Northport. They’re a very good team. I can see why they made the playoffs. They’ll be a tough team to beat,” said Dave Conlon, the Bonackers’ head coach. “I told all our guys, I said, ‘I am so freaking proud of you guys. The effort was unbelievable. I know it’s going to hurt tonight and tomorrow, but eventually you’re going to look back and be really proud. You have nothing to hang your head about.’ ”
The Bonackers were slow to start, so much so that they didn’t take their first lead until the final seconds of the fourth quarter. “It took us a little while to adjust to a team we’ve only seen on video, but once we settled in, I thought the boys played really well,” Conlon said.
Mason Jefferson tied the game at 41 on two foul shots with 4:25 left in regulation. Being fouled might have been his greatest accomplishment of the night. The referees were so reluctant to call anything in Bonac’s favor that it was shocking to see Jefferson on the line. But he knew just what to do.
“Mason — he got it done at the foul line,” Conlon said. “He struggled a little bit from the foul line at the beginning of the year, but he really improved his foul shooting. He spent a lot of time after practice knocking down foul shots, and he hit them when it counted.”
Unwilling to let his team lose, Toby Foster played his best game of the season and was so exhausted by the end of the first overtime that he could barely get the offense going. It wasn’t his highest point total of the year (18), but it was his most impressive effort.
“Toby is such a tough kid. He was not going to let us lose tonight,” Conlon said about his point guard. “He gave everything he could possibly give, but it just didn’t happen. That’s basketball. This was a great high school basketball game.”
It’s never easy to learn the lesson in a loss, but the boys have much to be proud of. From the East Hampton crowd that traveled two hours on a Friday night to be there in person to their athletic director watching on her big-screen TV on vacation — these boys caused a lot of laryngitis.
“It was a great run, proud of our guys for going to double overtime,” Kathy Masterson, the athletic director, said. “The kids never gave up, and that is what Bonac is all about.”
