‘Now it’s on to the next’: Regional championship is start of what Blue Devils hope is fruitful postseason

BELLEVILLE, Ill. — The sea of blue that flooded the Belleville West High School gym made Dom Clay feel like he was at Blue Devil Gym.

“It felt like home, for sure,” Clay said.

As the Quincy High School boys basketball team kept extending their blistering scoring run to start Friday’s Class 4A Belleville West regional championship game against Belleville East, the decibel level created by those Blue Devils fans kept rising.

“It was crazy,” Clay said.

That run reached 16-0 when Clay threw down his second breakaway dunk with 2:06 left in the first quarter, giving the No. 1 seed Blue Devils enough cushion to hold off a late push from the fourth-seeded Lancers in a 57-50 victory.

“The first few minutes, we were playing as free as possible,” senior forward Keshaun Thomas said. “When we’re moving the ball up the court without any dribbles, we’re one of the best teams in the state. We’re unstoppable when we do that. We have to do that the whole entire game. If we do that, no team can compete with us.”

The Lancers scored their first point on a Xavien Moody free throw after Clay received a technical foul for hanging on the rim following his second dunk, but the Blue Devils stretched that lead to 23-4 in the final minute of the first frame.

That emphatic first quarter was a far cry from Wednesday’s semifinal game against seventh-seeded O’Fallon when it took the Blue Devils more than six minutes to take their first lead.

“We didn’t want that to happen at all,” said Clay, who finished with 14 points. “When we last played, we played horrible in the first half. We know that’s not our game.”

Blue Devils coach Andy Douglas did not anticipate a repeat of Wednesday’s slow start.

“We’re too good of a team and have too many weapons to allow that to happen two games in a row,” Douglas said. “You might get one. It can’t happen twice. I thought we came out with a different mindset tonight.”

Blue Devils senior guard Bradley Longcor III scored 14 of his game-high 19 points in the first quarter. Douglas said Longcor’s assertiveness rubbed off on his teammates.

“Brad played extremely well,” Douglas said. “He played with a lot of confidence. I thought our team fed off of how he played there in the first quarter. He got guys amped up ready to go.”

The Lancers trimmed a 17-point deficit at the end of the first quarter to nine by halftime. The Blue Devils’ lead stayed between five and 12 points until the 2:01 mark of the fourth quarter when the Lancers went on an 8-0 run over the next 1:04 to cut the Blue Devils’ advantage to 52-48. Jacori Brown capped off that run by stealing a Longcor pass and converting a layup plus a free throw.

While those 64 seconds turned what was trending toward a comfortable win into a tense home stretch, Longcor and his teammates remained poised and confident.

“We made some mistakes that we usually don’t make, but we all had it in our head that we were going to be fine,” Longcor said.

The Blue Devils took care of the ball, never allowed the Lancers to get any closer and got three consecutive defensive stops to seal their fourth consecutive regional title.

“We kept telling our guys, ‘We know it’s going to be a dogfight. We’re proud of where we are, but we know that they’re going to throw some blows,’ and they did that,” Douglas said. “I thought our guys did a really good job of withstanding the second quarter run and also in the second half, finding a way to battle back.”

Longcor said the stiff challenges the Blue Devils, which entered the postseason ranked third in the Associated Press Class 4A state poll, have faced in their last three games dating back to the regular season finale — a 58-53 loss to Rock Island — have thickened their skin and lit an even hotter fire under them.

“We’re not untouchable,” Longcor said. “We have to come out every game like it’s our last, which it could be now.”

The Blue Devils (29-3) will keep that fire burning into their Collinsville Sectional semifinal game against No. 3 seed Alton, which upended second-seeded Edwardsville 55-47 on Friday. Tipoff for Tuesday’s clash between the Blue Devils and Redbirds is scheduled for 6 p.m.

“Now it’s on to the next,” Longcor said.