Spartans finish strong against Peabody

PEABODY – Trailing Peabody 46-42 with 2:06 left in regulation, the St. Mary’s girls basketball team was in danger of seeing its record sink to 6-6 with another crushing loss. But the defending Division 3 state champions showed the heart of a champion over the final 120 seconds of play.Scoring the game’s final 12 points, the Spartans roared back to take a 54-46 win and perhaps turn around their season.Click here for a photo gallery.”This is the first time in recent memory that we’ve faced a must-win regular season game like we did (Tuesday),” St. Mary’s coach Jeff Newhall said. “This team has been searching for an identity and maybe we finally found it (Tuesday).”St. Mary’s (7-5) had led through most of the game after spotting the Tanners the game’s opening basket. The lead was 12 after a quarter but Peabody slowly began to chip away at the deficit and early in the fourth quarter the Tanners got all the way back to take the lead 39-38.They pushed the lead to four on three occasions, the last of which came on a pair of Alex Lomasney free throws with 2:06 left that made it 46-42. The Spartans then moved the ball briskly on their next possession, resulting in Jennie Mucciarone getting a wide open three that made it a one-point game.Peabody failed to convert on its next two possessions and the Spartans were able to take the lead back with 50 seconds left when Ann Marie Idusuyi put back a Sharell Sanders miss to make it 47-46.Carolyn Scacchi was fouled for the Tanners with 32.9 seconds left but she missed both free throws and Melissa Stueve knifed in and got the rebound for the Spartans.”It came down to free throws and boxing out on missed shots,” Peabody coach Jane Heil said. “We work on that in practice every day and it came back and killed us.”Stueve made one of two at the line to make it a two-point game. The Tanners failed to hit on their next possession and Sanders was fouled on the rebound. Her two free throws made it 50-46 with 21.5 seconds to go.Peabody would miss again on the ensuing two possessions, with Idusuyi and Sanders both hitting two freebies to account for the final four points.”We’ve been so up and down this year,” Newhall said. “And to be down four with under two minutes remaining and to come back obviously says a lot about the poise this team has.”The way things began it looked for all the world like the Spartans were poised to run the Tanners right out of the gym as Sanders scored 12 of her game-high 21 points in the first quarter to push St. Mary’s to an 18-6 lead.”We stayed in our man-to-man defense way too long,” Heil said. “And they made us pay for it.”The Tanners shifted to a zone in the second quarter and it paid dividends as they cut the lead to five in a little under four minutes. St. Mary’s pushed the lead back to 10 before Peabody scored the final five points of the half to make it 23-18 at the break.Peabody would ride that momentum into the second half as it pounded the glass in the third quarter to help cut an eight-point lead to two thanks to six points from Scacchi.