Ramblers hold off Heritage for tourney title
The buzzer at the end of the game was just about to go off, but the drama was just getting ramped up.
A standing-room only crowd inside the Gordon Lee High School gym, who had been screaming at the top of its lungs a second earlier, was now mostly silent. Every eye in the building watching the ball as it was perched on the rim, willing it to fall one way or the other.
In that breathless moment, players and fans of both teams saw the ball make one agonizingly slow revolution around the top of the rim. For a split second, it almost seemed like the ball was going to literally stop and perfectly balance itself on back of the iron.
Then it tipped slightly to the right, fell off the rim and onto the floor as the buzzer sounded, which was followed by additional screams — elation from the LaFayette contingent and pure disbelief from the Heritage side.
In one of the most intense high school basketball games the northwest Georgia area has seen in quite sometime, the Ramblers (11-0) found a way to maintain their undefeated season with a heart-stopping 43-42 victory in the finals of the Chick-fil-A Christmas Tournament late Thursday night.
“To be honest, I couldn’t be more thankful for this game,” LaFayette head coach Hank Peppers said. “When you win and win big several games in a row, it’s so easy to get little complacent or to forget how hard winning is, so a game like this was perfect. Heritage really battled and I knew they would.”
Down 21-17 early in the third quarter on a very cold shooting night, the Ramblers used a put-back by Jordan Kennerly, a lay-in by Jaylon Ramsey, and a 3-pointer and two free throws from Zach Barrett to take their biggest
RAMBLERS, B4