They took good shots, they took bad shots, they went to the line and drove to the basket.
Yet, for Holy Cross, each offensive possession in Wednesday night’s 55-52 loss to Rice in the CHSAA Class AA intersectional semifinals at Carnesecca Arena seemed to be a recurring bad dream.
“It was really frustrating because it seems whether we did something right or not, the result was the same,” Holy Cross coach Paul Gilvary said.
The numbers were stunningly bad. After hitting their first two 3-pointers, the Knights missed their next 20. They shot 7-of-43 from the field and trailed Rice (19-9), 42-27 after three quarters.
“We’re very much a rhythm offense and we obviously were out of sync for the first three quarters,” Gilvary said. “In the fourth quarter, we started to kind of get it together a bit.”
Holy Cross (17-12) opened the fourth quarter on an 8-0 run and got within 49-48 on a second straight 3-pointer by Anthony Libroia (team-high 17 points), who fell out of bounds with 35.6 seconds left in regulation.
Jermaine Sanders and Richard Council helped limit Holy Cross star Evan Conti to just eight points through three quarters, but the senior swingman, who had 14 points, 10 rebounds and six assists, knocked down a pair of free throws with 28 seconds remaining after Rice’s Melvin Johnson drained two foul shots to again bring the Knights to within one.
After two more Johnson free throws and one by Sanders, who scored a game-high 30 points, Libroia’s layup with 8.9 seconds left kept Holy Cross alive.
And when Sanders went 1-of-2 from the line with 7.1 seconds left, Holy Cross, which shot 8-of-12 from the field and 5-of-9 from 3-point range in the fourth quarter, had one more chance.
Marcus Hopper grabbed the rebound and handed it to Marquise Moore, who raced past midcourt. The junior faked a shot from the top of the key and fed a wide-open Libroia, but his tying attempt rimmed out at the buzzer.
“I thought Marquise made a great play just to get him the ball because Marquise was kind of covered at the top and it would have been a miracle shot, but he had the presence of mind to find Anthony and Anthony was wide open,” Gilvary said. “In that situation you can’t ask for a much better shot than that. It just didn’t go in.”
“That’s not why we lost the game,” Gilvary added. “But that certainly was the final nail in the coffin.”
