City of Basketball Love

Owen McCue (@Owen_McCue)
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Seth Lundy likes to think of this year’s Roman Catholic squad as the Oklahoma City Thunder.

The Thunder are built around three star players: point guard Russell Westbrook and wings Paul George and Carmelo Anthony.

Roman Catholic is led by three Division I-level recruits. Lundy, a junior wing, has offers from Oregon and Bowling Green, senior wing Allen Betrand is committed to play at Towson next season, and sophomore guard Lynn Greer III already has interest from Temple, St. Joe's and several other schools.

Each one is capable of taking over a game.

“Whoever is hot, anybody can get 20 on any given night,” Lundy said.

Lundy said he could feel he had the hot hand before the game even started on Friday night at Archbishop Carroll. The shots swished through the net with regularity in pregame warmups and continued for the rest of the night.

He had five points in the first, 10 in the second, seven in the third and eight in the fourth quarter to finish with 30 points as the Cahillites picked up a 70-66 win.

“They knew I was the hot man, so they just kept feeding me the ball,” Lundy said.

It took much more than Lundy’s 30 for Roman to pull out the Catholic League victory though.

Greer, who finished with 19 points, scored the eventual game-winner when he hung in the air and got a tough layup to go with less than a minute left. The Cahillites came up with a stop and Louie Wild grabbed a huge rebound to give Roman the ball with a two-point lead and 19.1 seconds left.

Carroll forced a tie up, but Lundy blocked a shot and Betrand, who questioned the team’s toughness in an overtime loss to Bonner-Prendergast last Friday, dove on the ball to secure possession. Two Greer free throws later, the game was essentially out of reach.

Roman’s lone Catholic League losses entering Friday were a two-point loss to Neumann-Goretti and the two-point loss against Bonner. The win moved Roman to 5-2 in the PCL and tied them with Carroll for third place in the league standings.

“After we lost to Bonner, we were kind of down a little bit, but this is a good win to come in here at Carroll and really pull it out,” Wild said.

Despite dropping its second PCL game of the season, Carroll showed a lot of fight on Friday night, coming back from multiple fourth quarter deficits.

Roman junior Hakim Hart, another Divsion I prospect, drilled two threes, his only points of the game, in the first two minutes of the fourth to put the Cahillites up by six and swing the momentum back in the away team’s direction after Carroll made a run at the end of the third.

A 6-0 run by Carroll tied the game less than two minutes later before Lundy hit a three to put Roman back in the lead. Carroll’s Luke House tied the game with a three, but coming out of a timeout, Lundy drilled another one of his three triples, and the Patriots trailed once again.

The Cahillites built up another six-point lead with 1:35 left after Wild knocked down two free throws, but the Patriots and House had one more run in them.

House, who scored nine of his 16 points in the fourth, quickly pushed the ball down the court and finished off an and-one. After a Roman turnover he drilled a three to tie the game at 66-66 before Greer’s game-winning bucket.

Sophomore guard A.J. Hoggard led the Patriots with 19 points and senior guard Justin Anderson had 16.

“I feel really good about how resilient we’ve been,” Carroll coach Paul Romanczuk said. “We weren’t as resilient early on in the year. Now, we’re starting to get really resilient and battle back in games and show our toughness and togetherness. I have a lot of faith in our guys moving forward.”

“They made maybe just one more play than we did,” Romanczuk said.