SACRAMENTO – One of the great boys basketball seasons in San Ramon Valley history ended on Friday night without the state championship celebration the Danville school’s green-and-gold clad student section had come to watch.
But the Wolves didn’t go down without a fight.
Wobbled in the first quarter, SRV charged back to within single digits by halftime and got even closer in the third quarter before eventually falling to St. John Bosco-Bellflower 78-62 in the Division I state title game at Golden 1 Center.
Bosco simply had too much talent and too many shooters for SRV to keep pace.
The Wolves certainly tried. They pulled to within nine on Matthew Diekmann’s 3-pointer with just under four minutes left.
Seconds later, Max Ellis answered with a smooth-as-silk 3 for Bosco.
It was that kind of night.
But it hardly took away from the journey for SRV, which reached a state final for the fourth time in program history.
“This entire season has just been an amazing experience for these guys,” SRV coach Brian Botteen said. “It’s not going to hit me until some point this evening. But I am proud of everything they’ve done, the fight they’ve shown here. We definitely have to work on becoming a better first-quarter group. We seem to really gift those big leads from time to time.
“But our resiliency and fight was never in question.”
Bosco shot 50% (11 of 22) from 3-point territory and 58.8% (30 of 51) overall, its coach, Matt Dunn, saying afterward that previous games in large venues made a difference for his team.
The Braves got 20 points from senior guard Jack Turner, who was 4 for 6 from 3, and 20 points from sophomore superstar Brandon McCoy Jr., a transfer from Bishop O’Dowd.
Luke Isaak led San Ramon Valley with 18 points. Mason Thomas added 13 and seniors Seamus Deely, Jack Moxley and Diekmann each finished with eight.
San Ramon Valley ended the season 29-8.
Bosco, which won its second state crown in school history, is 28-7.
For SRV, reaching this stage as a neighborhood public-school team was a source of pride. Just as Deely looked up to previous SRV teams when he was younger, dreaming of one day playing himself, the Wolves became role models in their community.
After their NorCal championship victory on Tuesday over Granada, the players were asked to sign autographs for elementary-school kids who had come to see their local heroes.
“These other schools, they’re not doing it like us,” Deely said after Friday’s loss. “They’re bringing in transfers. They’re bringing in dudes from other states. The team we’re playing is bringing in a dude from our own area. Our only transfer is a guy (who) came back to his hometown school and lives a mile and a half away.
“We all did this together.”
With McCoy’s dunks and blocked shots helping to lead the way, Bosco threatened to put away SRV in the first quarter. Seven Braves scored in the period and four made 3-pointers.
The Southern California team led 28-11 after eight minutes, a deficit that might have rattled some teams.
But not SRV.
This is a team that spotted Archbishop Mitty a 13-0 lead in the NorCal regional semifinals last weekend and stormed back to advance.
SRV got hot in the second period, raised its level of defense by several notches and went to the locker room trailing by just eight points.
Given the manner in which the game started, that was a win for SRV.
Thomas led the second-quarter comeback with three 3-pointers. The junior guard was everywhere on the court during the SRV surge, at one point squeezing his 5-foot-10 body in a small crease to save the ball.
Deely retrieved it and scored for SRV to cut the margin to 35-27, providing hope that maybe the night would end with SRV’s second state championship. The program won the Division I title in 2015 at Cal.
“We had members from that 2015 squad send videos in,” Deely said. “They gave us some words of advice and encouragement and they said to really take a moment to cherish it, soak it all up. That’s exactly what I did. I could sit here and be super sad about coming up short at the end very end. But at the end of the day, we made it to the end. I wouldn’t do it with anyone else.”
SRV arrived in Sacramento with a resume deserving of the big stage. The Danville school overcame early hiccups at the start of the season to win one of the top divisions at the Damien Classic in Southern California over the holidays and prevail at De La Salle last month to capture the East Bay Athletic League tournament.
The Wolves bounced back from two losses in the North Coast Section Open Division playoffs to survive three tight games in the Northern California Division I regional, defeating Vanden, Archbishop Mitty and Granada by three points apiece.
Dunn, the Bosco coach, noted postgame that he saw SRV play at Damien and made a comment on the Bay Area team’s social media account about how “incredible I thought their culture and togetherness is.”
The coach added, “I thought that same thing tonight. Just an incredible team. Just a great program. That was fun to have a chance to compete against them.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com