By RICK SPRUNGER
They’ll be talking about this one for years.
Norwell slipped past Northwestern, 55-54, in the championship game of the Class 3A Sectional 23 girls’ basketball tournament Saturday night at the Castle.
Northwestern had five — count ‘em five — wide-open shots at the basket from eight feet or closer in the final 0:21, at least two of them virtually uncontested, and missed all five of them.
Norwell (21-3) will move on to the regional and a date with Hamilton Heights, now 17-5, after its equally pulse-pounding 42-41 win over Yorktown.
Northwestern, which had played in Class 4A for the last three years and reached the state championship game in that division in 2020, bowed out at 17-5.
This game was not for the faint of heart.
A red-eyed Northwestern coach Kathie Layden, grieving not only for her team but also for her own daughter, 6-2 senior All-State candidate and Purdue recruit McKenna Layden, who scored 21 points but missed three of those shots at the end, nonetheless composed herself to meet the media and was gracious in defeat.
Although choosing to speak mostly in generalities, she went out of her way to tip her hat to the Norwell defense.
“We like to play out of sets,” she explained, “but Norwell plays a trapping defense that got us out of our offense.”
It was a game that saw four ties and 10 lead changes, including five of the latter in the fourth quarter alone.
But all anyone is going to remember about this game is those final 21 seconds.
At the 0:27 mark when Northwestern’s, Anna Bishir, missed two free throws with her team trailing by that 55-54 score.
Haley Green grabbed the rebound and was immediately triple-teamed by Layden, Lexi Hale, and Bishir.
Layden ripped the ball out of her arms, turned around, and deposited it into the basket.
But an official came flying in from center court frantically blowing his whistle and waving it off. He gave Norwell a timeout
No basket. Norwell ball with 0:24 remaining.
Northwestern fans went ballistic.
“The timeout was definitely called before,” recounted Norwell coach Eric Thornton in the center of the floor while his girls happily cut down the nets. “He (the official) was standing right in front of me (during the free throws) and told me that if I needed a timeout, he would be listening for me in all that noise and that I should just holler.”
But it was his last timeout, a situation that came into play later.
A halfcourt inbounds pass to Kennedy Fuelling found the junior guard in immediate jeopardy.
She was tied up with 21 ticks left, and the ball went back to Northwestern.
The Tigers wasted no time in getting the ball to Bailey Henry in the post.
Layden beat her defender on a baseline move to the basket, took the pass, went up for an easy bunny on the right side — and missed.
Vannessa Rosswurm cleared the rebound and was immediately tied up.
This time the arrow favored Norwell with 0:15 to play.
But the Knights couldn’t get it inbounds and didn’t have a timeout to spend.
“I don’t regret when we called our timeouts, but we sure needed one there,” commented Thornton later.
The five-second call gave the ball right back to the Tigers under their basket.
The pass came into Hale, who put up an open eight-footer in the lane — and missed.
She grabbed her own rebound but had it knocked out of her hands by Green.
Players dove on the floor and fought for that ball.
Finally, another held ball was called — favoring Northwestern — with 0:10 remaining.
This time, Hale sprung around a pick and took the inbounds pass for an easy wide-open bunny on the left side – and missed.
Another held ball on the rebound went Norwell’s way at 0:04.9.
This time Norwell got the ball into Fuelling in the corner.
Fuelling went down in a heap and was whistled for traveling.
There was unrestrained joy from the purple people while Thornton was searching for an explanation.
“We had a set play, but we had two players (mistakenly) cut in the same direction,” said a relieved Thornton later. “We thought she got pushed, but the official told us that our two players ran into each other, and that’s a travel.”
Unbelievably, Northwestern had yet another chance with 0:03.2 left.
Layden took the inbounds pass eight feet out in the lane.
But she had to reach over a perfectly positioned Makenzie Fuess, and her shot was off-balance.
She followed her shot and got a controlled tip-up on the rim.
But it fell off, the buzzer sounded, and pandemonium broke loose.
Heroes were aplenty for Norwell.
Start with Vanessa Rosswurm.
A freshman non-starter, Rosswurm scored nine points, grabbed a game-high eight rebounds, and handed out a couple of assists.
But she saved the best for last, canning not only the two biggest shots of her young career but arguably the biggest two of Norwell’s season until now.
With the Knights trailing 52-50 and seemingly hanging on by a fingernail, Rosswurm delivered a 15-footer from the right elbow that gave the Knights a tie with 2:16 left.
Then, trailing 54-52, the 5-9 freshman – keyword freshman – stepped up and drilled the three-pointer that provided her team with the winning points with 0:40 remaining.
“She was ready for that moment,” praised her coach. “She has practiced and practiced and practiced her shooting in the off-season. She has shot thousands of times, and she was ready.”
Then there’s Kennedy Fuelling, whose 21 points matched those of her more celebrated rival on the other side.
It was her fourth three-pointer of the game with 3:59 left that rescued the Knights from a 51-47 deficit, got them back in it at 51-50, and set up the final sequence.
And Makenzie Fuess.
She joined Fuelling in double figures with 11 points to help the offense but came up especially big on defense.
It was Fuess, face-guarding Layden with both arms straight up in the air, forcing the future Boilermaker to alter her win-or-lose shot at the end, and she did so without fouling her.
And don’t forget about Annabelle Johnson.
Johnson only scored two points but dished out a whopping nine assists, including three in a row during a 12-0 Norwell run in the second quarter that gave the Knights their biggest lead of the game at 27-19.
And then there were the two big ones: Johnson was the one who got the ball to Rosswurm for both of her two game-ending shots.
Layden didn’t disappoint, adding seven rebounds and seven assists to her 21 points for the Tigers.
Fortunately for Norwell, however, she will be dressed for her next game in Purdue black and gold, not Northwestern purple.
Hale added 13 points, seven rebounds, and four assists herself as the two of them repeatedly found open teammates for wide-open layups, particularly in the first half.
“We were playing too high on the back side of our zone,” said Thornton, going into x’s-and-o’s mode. “Our big halftime talk was about that. Of their 22 points in the first half, 11 came off backside layups.”
Tears flowed freely outside the Northwestern locker room after the game as the players prepared for a long, quiet, and miserable bus ride back to Kokomo.
But those tears could just as easily have been colored navy and gold had any of those last five shots gone down.
“You know,” said the elder Layden outside that locker room, “we dropped back into Class 3A this year, and we got sent to a sectional an hour and a half away to play teams we are not at all familiar with. “We were supposed to be only the third best team here. But I think we showed that we came here to win.”
The Tigers had rallied from a 16-point third-quarter deficit to sideline Bellmont one night earlier and then very nearly won this one.
“It wasn’t for a lack of effort,” she continued. “We just came up a little short at the end.”
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NORWELL 55, NORTHWESTERN 54
At Norwell High School
NORWELL (21-3): Dekota Hubble 4-5 1-2 9, Kennedy Fuelling 7-16 3-4 21, Lillian Norris 1-5 0-0 3, Annabelle Johnson 1-4 0-3 2, Makenzie Fuess 5-12 0-0 11, Vanessa Rosswurm 3-7 2-4 9, Haley Green 0-0 0-0 0. TOTAL: 21-49 6-13 55.
NORTHWESTERN (17-5): Ashley Newell 1-9 2-2 4, McKenna Layden 8-15 4-5 21, Anna Bishir 3-4 2-5 9, Lexi Hale 5-8 3-6 13, Bailey Henry 3-3 1-1 7, Berkley Wray 0-0 0-0 0, Halie Koetter 0-2 0-0 0. TOTAL: 20-41 12-19 54.
Norwell 13 14 14 14 — 55
Northwestern 8 14 20 12 — 54
Three-point shooting: Norwell 7-19 (Fuelling 4-9, Norris 1-2, Johnson 0-1, Fuess 1-5, Rosswurm 1-2), Northwestern 2-9 (Newell 0-6, Layden 1-2, Bishir 1-1). Rebounds: Norwell 28 (Rosswurm 8), Northwestern 25 (Layden 7, Hale 7, Henry 6). Turnovers: Norwell 16, Northwestern 20. Personal fouls: Norwell 16, Northwestern 13. Fouled Out: Hubble.
