Murphy girls pull away from Lady Cardinals in fourth quarter.
Basketball nirvana isn't achieved very often, but when everything clicks for a team on both ends of the floor, something special happens.
And in the fourth quarter of the N.C. High School Athletic Association 1A Girls Basketball Championship fourth round between Murphy and East Surry, the Lady Bulldogs found that nirvana.
The Lady Dogs' defense moved in perfect sync, flowing from one side of the court to the other and suffocating any 3-point attempts by East Surry on their way to a 65-45 win over the Lady Cardinals.
"That's a good basketball team,' Murphy head coach Ray Gutierrez said after the game. "We took some punches early on, they were shooting well. But to come out and really clamp down in the second, third and fourth quarters, I'm super proud of our kids. We knew that we had to run them off of the line and we didn't do a very good job of that in the first quarter, but we did better in the final three."
Murphy held the Lady Cardinals to just six points in the fourth quarter, while piling on the point on the other end thanks to dominant play on the low block from forward Torin Rogers and Sarah Pullium.
Rogers finished with a game-high 25 points, all in the paint and from the free-throw line, and pulled down 10 rebounds for the Lady Dogs.
"It's great not only to get to go to the Final Four again, but to beat East Surry," Rogers said of the victory. "One of our keys the whole year has been to own the paint, so that was a big one for this game. We decided to work the high-low and it got us open a lot and we scored a lot off of it, so that was a huge key to us winning this game."
Pullium ended the night with 19 points, including a huge offensive rebound and put-back and-one down the stretch to build upon Murphys' lead.
"They're both so skilled," Gutierrez said of Rogers and Pulliums' offensive performance against East Surry. "Torin is your inside-out player and Sarah is just hard-nosed and gets in there and does everything. And so, that's a great one-two punch and it'll be very hard for any team in the state to match up with those two girls in the paint."
Murphy senior Sydni Addison picked apart East Surrys' defense throughout the evening, tallying a team-high seven assists to go with her nine points in the victory.
The Lady Dogs win over East Surry avenges last year's Final Four loss, in which the Lady Cardinals advances thanks to a last-ditch heave at the buzzer.
"We really didn't really talk about listing this as a revenge game," Gutierrez said. "We have such a special season going on right now and I told them, "It's all about 2020, you have the opportunity to go undefeated and to be one of the best teams to ever come out of this conference. So it was more about that tonight rather than that East Surry beat us last year."
Murphy now advances to the NCHSAA 1A Western Regional Championship on Saturday at Catawba Community College in Hickory and will play the winner of the Alleghany-Mitchell game that has been postponed til Wednesday. Tipoff is set for 2:15 p.m. and tickets can be purchased ahead of time online or at the game beforehand.