The Indiana state boys basketball playoffs are among the most heated and obsessively followed of any sport at any level in the country. March heroes in Indiana become legends overnight as video and word of their triumphs spread like wildfire. Remember Gary Harris in 2012? He’s now a freshman star at Michigan State, but he’ll never outgrow that buzzer beater.
Now Harris and the likes of Hickory High have company, in the person of Lafayette (Ind.) McCutcheon High sophomore Tre’Shon Heard, who drilled a buzzer beater from a full 80 feet to top Logansport (Ind.) High in the Indiana Class 4A Lafayette Jeff section semifinal.
“I had it in my hand, and I had to turn around and let it go,” Heard told the Journal Courier. “I just had to get it up there.
“I looked at it for a minute, and something told me it was going to be a good shot.”
Heard got it up there, and when his shot came down McCutcheon could celebrate a 56-53 victory and a berth in the sectional title game against Kokomo (Ind.) High. The resulting crush of fans stampeding on to the court was a fitting testament to the delirium the win brought, yet was also slightly scary for the 5-foot-9 Heard, who was rapidly swamped under the gaggle of the onrushing crowd.
Something tells Prep Rally that Heard would be happy to trade off that personal risk for the shot of his life slipping through the net exactly as it did.
“Fortunately we did enough at the end of the game to be there, and that shot by Tre — that’s a once-in-a-lifetime type shot,” McCutcheon coach Rick Peckinpaugh said. “You don’t expect that to go in, but doggone it I’m glad it did.”
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