Wreck it, Ralph! QHS sophomore guard’s game-winning layup ends Kahoks’ win streak, sends Blue Devils into sectional title game

COLLINSVILLE, Ill. — Any aspect of the final sequence — the split, the bounce or the bucket — could have been negated by a whistle.

Ralph Wires prayed he wouldn’t hear one.

With time evaporating rapidly and overtime looming, the Quincy High School boys basketball team’s sophomore point guard found himself in a now-or-never situation. So he split two Collinsville defenders with a big bounce forward, planted his right foot and laid the game-winning shot in off the backboard as time expired.

He never heard a whistle either.

Wires’ shot saved the Blue Devils, giving them a 34-32 victory over the Kahoks in Tuesday night’s semifinals of the Class 4A Collinsville Sectional at Vergil Fletcher Gym.

“Well, um, I’m kind of at a loss for words,” Wires said when he began describing how the final possession unfolded. “We started scrambling and there wasn’t much time left. I ripped through there and knew I had to get the shot off. We didn’t have enough time for anything else.

“I had to take matters into my own hands I guess.”

Still, there was that fear it might go awry.

“I did think the shot was going in, but I thought I traveled,” Wires said. “I really thought I traveled, but I didn’t.”

His teammates had similar worries.

“I sort of hoped he didn’t travel right there,” QHS freshman forward Keshaun Thomas said. “It was a good move. He got to the rim, which is what we needed.”

It’s what the Blue Devils needed to advance to a sectional championship game for the first time since 2009. Quincy (27-5) will face Normal Community (33-1) at 7 p.m. Friday at Vergil Fletcher Gym. The Ironmen won their 26th consecutive game by beating Moline 61-44 in the other semifinal in Pekin’s Dawdy Hawkins Gym.

“That’s a tall task, no pun intended,” Quincy coach Andy Douglas said. “They’re a massive team. It’s a team with only one loss all season long, so we have our work cut out for us. But if our guys can find a way to fight and battle like we did tonight and we have all season, I like our chances.”

They’ve proven to be streak busters already, ending the Kahoks’ 18-game winning streak.

It took some serious resolve to make that happen.

Trailing by four with less than five minutes to play in regulation, the Blue Devils’ Jeremiah Talton scored from the block to cut the deficit in half. Following a turnover by the Kahoks and a timeout with 3:31 to go, Blue Devils freshman Bradley Longcor III, who led Quincy with nine points, scored on a backdoor cut off a pass from Reid O’Brien to tie the game at 32 with 3:20 to go.

“Just grit,” O’Brien called it. “Against a team like Collinsville, the way they play, the way they hold the ball and get good shots, you have to have grit.”

After the Blue Devils tied the game, the Kahoks decided to sit on it as long as possible.

Collinsville (26-6) burned three timeouts in the span of 1 minute, 22 seconds — one was used when a ballhandler was trapped in the corner with no avenue for rescue — and took more than two minutes off the clock. 

“I was thinking, ‘Hold it as long as you want,’” Wires said. “We were going to get a stop, and we were going to get a bucket and win this game.”

With 1:05 remaining, the Kahoks’ Jake Wilkinson missed a mid-range jumper with O’Brien tipping the rebound to Longcor to give the Blue Devils the possession. Quincy sat on the ball, too, waiting until 21.8 seconds remaining to call timeout.

Yet, the moment they inbounded the ball, the Blue Devils had to scrap everything they had just talked about.

“We thought they were going to go man-to-man,” Douglas said. “They went zone. And then we wanted to get a high ball screen up top, and that didn’t materialize. It wasn’t a clean-cut play by any means. When you need to make plays, we made plays.”

This time, Longcor gave the ball up to Wires to make a play.

There were three seconds remaining when Longcor swung a pass from the top of the key to Wires on the left wing. Collinsville’s Matt Clark jumped at Wires, who dribbled hard with his left hand past Clark and then bounced inside the Kahoks’ Travion Swygeart, who slide over from the corner.

It opened up an unabated path to the basket.

“For a split second, I got giddy and was like, ‘Oh, that’s so wide open,’” O’Brien said. “And Ralph makes those. It’s a wide-open layup. He’s going to make it. He has, too.”

The question on the sideline was whether he’d beat the clock.

“When I saw him drive, I saw the lane that he had,” Douglas said. “My only concern was how much time would he have to get there. He was low on time. But if there’s anybody to drive on a play like that with the utmost confidence — sometimes he has a little too much confidence — I put Ralph up there.”

Wires released the shot in time, watching it come off the backboard as the buzzer sounded and drop through for his only basket of the game.

“It was amazing,” Wires said. “It has to be the greatest feeling.”