Chi falls just shy at buzzer in attempt to rally past Unionville

UPPER CHICHESTER » Akhir Keys took an in-bounds pass with his team down three points, his packed home gym’s game clock showing 10 seconds, his mind telling him one thing — go get a tie.

Chichester’s long road to a second-half comeback against Unionville looked scripted at that point, and as Keys drove left down the sideline to avoid flailing defenders, all looked right when he pulled up for a good look, attempting another late escape act the senior guard had pulled several times already this season.

Yet Chi’s district title hopes would cruelly go in, then out with the ball.

“If I made that shot,” Keys said, “we probably would have won.”

It was the last best chance for the Eagles, who afterward would get a lastprayer launch from way out, well off the mark at the buzzer, enabling the Longhorns to hold on to a 75-72 victory Saturday in a District 1 Class 5A semifinal thriller.

With cuts through the lane and a selection of open looks beyond the arc, Unionville’s Robbie Logan and Ryan Brown kept hitting shots to keep in front. The two shared game-high honors of 21 points, with Logan hitting two 3-pointers amid a desperate Chi comeback effort in the waning minutes of the fourth.

They came after Logan had missed a couple of good looks earlier in the quarter.

“The two I hit (at the end), I shot with more confidence,” Logan said. “I was just more ready to shoot than I was the first two.”

Asked if a roaring crowd in the small Chi gym impacted his team at all as the game grew tense, Logan added, “Yeah, I think a little bit. But we kept our mentality and just blocked it out.”

For that, Unionville (234) earns a trip to Temple’s Liacouras Center next Saturday, taking on unbeaten Radnor in the district title game, after the Raptors rallied past Rustin. As for Chi (20-5), led by senior point guard Maz Sayed’s 20 points and 16 each from Akhir and Zaiyin Keys, it’s a wait for states. But this game might have helped them in trying to keep a promise of going farther than their states trip last year.

“I think we’re ready to go on a state run,” Akhir Keys said. “Even though we lost today, we’ve still got next week.”

With the Longhorns finding their aim at the perimeter early, it didn’t take long for the Eagles to fall into trouble. Chi had scored the first five points of the game and the Longhorns had only hooked several needless fouls. But that changed in the second quarter, when the Longhorns changed a tie game into a 37-27 lead over a six-minute stretch.

“I thought at halftime we had the opportunity to put our foot on the gas and kind of end it,” Unionville coach Chris Cowles said. “But they are a tough team, man.

Good players, they’re well coached, so I didn’t expect it to be that way. Then they got the first couple baskets of the second half, I kind of figured we were going to be in it for the long haul.”

Trailing 41-32 at intermission, the Eagles came out strong and tied it at 44 on an Akhir Keys shot, then they took a two-point lead off a highlight reel underhand layup by Sayed with three minutes left in the third. But over those three minutes, Logan, James Anderson and Brown all hit from beyond the arc, and Unionville’s lead was at 55-48.

Logan’s brief chilly spot in the fourth helped the Eagles launch another offensive, with a Zaiyin Keys trey cutting the Unionville lead to 65-62 with 2:58 left. A reverse layup by Eyan Thomas (second straight doubledouble at 10 points and 13 rebounds) brought them to within a single point, but Sayed fouled out with 1:45 left, changing the landscape for Chi. And Logan changed everything else, hitting a pair of baseline 3-pointers on consecutive possessions for 71-67 lead.

Yet with the clock down to the final seconds, there was Akhir Keys with the ball, speeding downcourt to create room, and shooting a long-ball that seemed to have tied game written all over it, but would twice find only rim before dropping to the floor.

“Anytime you can have games like this and it comes down to the end, and it’s possession-by-possession, and it’s nip-and-tuck, and it’s always something that both teams can gain experience from,” said Chi coach Clyde Jones, whose club hit on 24 of 60 shots from the field. “So it makes us better and it makes them better.”