This certainly wasn’t a thing of beauty and Park Center needed 12 extra minutes of play to do it, but the Pirates scrapped and clawed and finally found a way to victory over Marshall 73-71 in triple-overtime for the Class 3A championship.

It was first basketball title of any sort in school history.

Park Center did it without it star player, Cayla McMorris, who was sent to the bench with five fouls in late in regulation. They did it without an outside game, making just four of 33 three-point attempts.

They even did it with players too young to have driver's licenses: no player on the floor for the Pirates at the end of the game was older than 10th-grade. Four of them – guards Danielle Schaub and Ann Simonet, forward Feyisayo Ayobamidele and center Mikayla Hayes – were freshmen.

“That was a real war of attrition,” Park Center coach Chris VanderHyde said. “The players we had in there have performed like that all year, so I wasn’t surprised. They worked their butts off.”

For much of the second half, getting to one overtime seemed a tall order, much less three.

The Pirates were their usual annoying selves on defense, forcing normally sound Marshall into an uncharacteristic 30 turnovers. But the offense was half of what it should be. They scored points off of turnovers, as they always do, but the shooting was abysmal.

“It was just one of those games,” Schaub said. “The shots weren’t falling, so we had to focus on other things.”

It was Schaub, a 5-foot-4 the smallest player on the court, who hit the game’s biggest shot. Park Center had rallied back from a nine-point second-half deficit, cutting the lead to 60-58, when McMorris fouled out with 20.1 seconds left in the game. The Pirates most dependable scorer and undeniable leader was no longer available.

No matter. When a play designed for Hayes broke down, Schaub acted on instinct, dribbling into the lane and hitting a floater at time expired, sending the game to overtime.

“I’ve seen Danielle hit that shot 100 times in practice so I knew it was good,” VanderHyde said.

Marshall scored first in all three overtimes, yet the Tigers could not make any of this leads stick. 

Hayes tied the game with a short jumper at the end of the first extra session. A steal and layup by Simonet, who finished with a game-high 26 points, capped the second overtime. And Ayobamidele had a big basket and a bigger steal to seal the victory.

“We couldn’t lose, not with Cayla on the bench,” Schaub said. “With everything she’s done for this program, we wanted to do it for her.”

McMorris, a University of Wisconsin recruit, said it was difficult to sit, unable to help her teammates when they needed her most, but that never doubted they’d come through.

“I’m a part of this team,” she said. “I wish I could have been out there with them, but I knew they could do it. I believed in them.”

With its star player on the bench having fouled out, Park Center leaned on a kiddie corps of freshmen to pull out an exhausting 73-71 triple-overtime victory over Marshall in the Class 3A championship game.

Park Center’s Cayla McMorris was sent to the bench with five fouls in the final seconds of regulation with the Pirates trailing 60-58.

Freshmen guard Danielle Schaub tied the game at 60 in the final second of regulation to force overtime. Three other freshan -- guard Ann Simonet, forward Feyisayo Adobamidele and center Mikayla Hayes also  came through with big playsin each of the extra sessions to lead the Pirates to their first state championship.

Check back later for more on the game.