Pocatello.... the results...

Life in Pocatello wasn’t easy. First, I talked Aunt Rosie into coming with us. I am so lucky that Aunt Rosie supports my children in all their endeavors. She knows what to say when any of my children are upset. She knows how to make light of a difficult situation. She knows how to keep my kids in adventure mode. She knows how to make them sing when they are upset. I am sooooo blessed to have her for my sister.
When I asked her to come, she paused and said, “I can’t think of any reason I can’t go.” So six of us packed tight in a car made for 5 and six of us slept in a room made for four. We were close but that part was easy. Love grows in small places.
The hard part was the games. Oh my gosh! The first game we started out six to nothing. I like games like that. Reanna has had that hurt tendon in her knee and wasn’t able to play as much as she normally does. When she was pulled out partly to rest her knee and partly because they combined the 3rd grade and 4th grade team so they had to let everyone play the other team took the lead. They were up by 1 point with about 30 seconds left in the game. We did score but I’m pretty sure that kind of game ages my 30 years. The second game was much better. The kind I really like. It was 34 to 6 I think, something right around there. Then we learned the second team had played the first team and when the person we talked to who had watched the game, had left the night before, the second team was winning. For some reason we could handle that second team better then the first team.
The next game, just because of how the wins losses went, was against that first team again but the outcome wasn’t as pretty. It was basically the same story but in the last 30 seconds they scored again and we didn’t so we lost to them by three.
The fourth game we played the second team again and the score was about 24 or 26 to 1. Then those two teams played each other to see who would play us in the finals. Of course we were all cheering for the second team. However, the first team won. The championship game against the second team was following the same routine as the first two games against them. We ended up down by 2 with just seconds to go and we scored to send the game into overtime. Now if the regular game aged me 30 years an overtime game aged me 100. After that weekend I’m officially 200 years old. Overtime was 3 minutes and after about the first minutes and our little player who is no bigger then a bug made a bucket. For 3rd and 4th graders it’s not unusual to go 3 minutes or 6 minutes or even an entire quarter with just a single bucket. That one bucket allowed me to breath. The same little bug got fouled and made a single free throw and then the other team scored. We were up by 1 point and time was running out. We tossed the ball in from the other end and Randy said he hates this kind of thing. This is the kind of play where the other team can steal the ball in the inbound and because our team is on the other side of the court, when they steal the ball there’s no one to stop them.
That’s exactly what happened. The ball was thrown in and the other team stole it and headed to their basket for a free lay up while all of our girls were down on the other end. Remember we are up by 1 point so this basket will put them ahead. Every now and then God just smiles on you for no apparent reason and the lay up was missed. We got the rebound and at our end another bucket and the buzzer sounded. We won by three points. Our girls are all champions! It was sooooooooo worth it.
Before we left to go to Pocatello, we made a poster to support our team. The one game we lost, we didn’t have the poster with us. We made sure it went with us to every other game and it became the good luck poster. Now I think we’ll be keeping that poster with us for every game forever.
Pocatello wasn’t easy on us. We didn’t win without working for it. But we won and we have another basketball champion among us.
We also have some fantastic basketball supporters including Aunt Rosie who is always there for my kids. Another big surprise was Squishy who has never liked attending sporting events. She really is coming a long way into being a fun, happy kid. I think she even had a good time. I think everyone had a good time.