East Aurora 67, Marmion 55

Trailing by six points at halftime, Marmion's basketball team scratched and clawed its way back to tie East Aurora midway through the third quarter.

It took East Aurora all of 36 seconds to counter the Cadets' comeback.

Explosive East Aurora turned Saturday night's game from a 40-40 tie into a 58-41 lead in little more than five minutes. The 18-1 blitz turned a close contest upside down as the Tomcats rolled to a 67-55 win at Marmion.

William Brown came off the bench to trigger the game-turning tide, scoring eight of his team-high 12 points during the run.

Meanwhile, Marmion (10-9) went without a field goal for more than eight minutes -- the equivalent of one quarter -- despite being able to survive East's vaunted three-quarter court press for much of the game.

It wasn't so much getting the ball into the offensive zone for the Cadets; it was about putting the ball in the basket.

"We didn't have a great shooting night, but we were competitive to the end," Marmion coach Rashon Burno said. "If we hit a few more jump shots here or there, the outcome may have been a little different."

Fatigue proved to be a deciding factor as East Aurora (13-8) rotated 10 players with regularity. In addition to Brown's 12 points, Jamar Shepard added 12, Andrew Dockery 11, Ryan Hayden 10 and Ryan Boatright 9.

"Great team effort," East Aurora coach Wendell Jeffries said. "I think our depth just wore them down. We still had a lot of energy at the end. When you run players in and out like we do, you can get those good spurts like we did."

Marmion had a burst of its own to begin the third quarter and postpone the Tomcats' runaway. Sean Fichtel (13 points) and Tyler Smith (16 points) each hit 3-pointers, and each scored on driving layups as well as the Cadets outscored East 13-5 in the first three minutes after halftime.

Then Marmion went inside to James O'Shaughnessy for a pair of baskets. When he scored on a lob pass with 4:40 left in the third, it tied the game at 40-40.

And that was about it. Marmion went the next 8:13 without a field goal until Smith hit a 3-pointer midway through the fourth. The Cadets had just three fields in the final 13 minutes.

"Once they had that run, we got rattled and couldn't come back," Burno said. "They (East) were the better team; they go 10 kids deep, and the talent level really doesn't drop off much among them."

Bryce Emory tied for team-high honors with 16 points for Marmion. Emory, Smith and Fichtel accounted for 45 of the Cadets' 55 points, whereas East had eight players contribute to the scoring column.

"Give Marmion all the credit in the world; they were well prepared and their kids played extremely hard," Jeffries said. "But once we got a double-digit lead on them, they weren't able to be patient anymore, and that's when we started giving them a lot of problems with our press and our zone defense."