Old Lyme girls earn another shot at East Hampton in quarters

Old Lyme — The marquee greeting visitors at Old Lyme on Friday trumpeted the boys' basketball team as the new Shoreline Conference champs, punctuated with the line, "It's a great day to be a Wildcat." It wasn't such a bad night, either. They have this basketball thing down rather efficiently in the 06371.

One night after the boys won the league title, the eighth-seeded girls advanced to the Class S quarterfinals with a 61-22 win over No. 9 Aerospace.

Old Lyme, a two-time state champion, plays No. 1 (and Shoreline regular season champ) East Hampton next Thursday.

"We've talked about tournaments to the kids a lot and what it takes to win them," said Old Lyme coach Don Bugbee, who led Old Lyme to the 2009 state title. "All those little things you do add up. They're important. Watching the boys was great. I personally think it's the best boys' team we've ever had here."

And now the boys and the girls get to play into next week.

Sam Gray led the Wildcats with 21 points. Megan Loflin had 12 in a game where Old Lyme was barely challenged. Aerospace didn't score for the first six minutes and trailed 25-6 in the first half. Old Lyme didn't allow the lead under 11 the rest of the way.

"We played all 14 and got contributions from almost everybody," Bugbee said. "That made me happy. We did a lot of good things, especially with the number of kids we played. I liked the way we moved the ball."

The degree of difficulty gets steeper now. East Hampton beat Old Lyme twice during the regular season.

"I don't like that 'it's hard to beat a team three times in one season' thing," Bugbee said. "I remember back in the day we used to hear that about playing Morgan. It was hard to beat Morgan once. I'm sick of losing to East Hampton, I know that."

Bugbee knows better than many of his colleagues what's required to win a state title. Because he's done that. So don't tell him his team has nothing to lose next week.

"Unless we're playing a team where we're totally overmatched, like New London or something," Bugbee said, "I don't want to hear we have nothing to lose. We have everything to lose." m.dimauro@theday.com